Elliott Smith's XO (2 page)

Smith’s lyrical prowess, and his lyrical precision in particular, remain largely obfuscated by his reliance upon simple and unassuming language. And while Smith utilized a conventional and conversational pop song vocabulary, he mobilized common words to unique thematic ends. By drawing attention to his lyrics as meticulous, intentional writing—
not
simple confession—I attempt to shed light on some of the beliefs, ideas, and attitudes that permeate
XO,
especially those that explicitly contradict Smith’s supposed biography.

In the second section of this book, I examine the cultural construct of “Elliott Smith”—how Smith was introduced to us via the media, and how the resultant construct was read against
XO.
Rather than simply dismissing the “Elliott Smith” produced by popular culture, I argue that it is important to analyze how this figure came to be, not only for understanding
XO’s
cultural legacy, but also for understanding how problematic concepts of “authenticity” and biography can color our understanding of music in general. The way we discuss artists matters—it changes and directs the way we hear and understand their work. In examining the myth of “Elliott Smith,” I attempt to provoke a wider discussion about agency, narrative, and craft.

Specifically, I seek to explore how Smith’s positioning as an “obscure singer-songwriter” and the story of his “sudden ascent” created contradictory demands and expectations that were often articulated and tenuously resolved via Smith’s “personal life.” Smith often spoke of the difference between personal turmoil and artistic craft, both on
XO
and in countless interviews conducted around the time of the album’s release, but this troubling correlation often informed Smith’s popular image, even in articles ostensibly refuting it.

I must admit that this book is meant to be something of a corrective; not to “set the record straight” about Elliott Smith’s life, but rather to deemphasize his personal struggles and examine his craft. I can make no claim that any amount of research I could do would give me a window to the “real person” behind Smith’s music. Furthermore, as Smith was well aware, knowing a “real person”—and that person’s trials, tribulations, and failings—doesn’t necessarily help you to understand that person’s art. In fact, as my initial experience with Elliott Smith suggests, the illusion of such an understanding can lead to very limited and unsympathetic readings. In a 1999 interview with Spin Magazine, Smith said, “I don’t like when people talk about all the bad things that have happened to them as if that makes them unique. Because I don’t think I’ve had a harder time than other people.” As a songwriter, Smith needs no excuses and no apologies. It is no coincidence that
XO
contains neither.

Certain albums have fantastic back stories, rife with interpersonal turmoil, record industry intervention, and/or the birth or destruction of a local musical scene or cultural movement.
XO
is not one of those records. The extenuating circumstances directly leading up to the release of the album, which I will discuss briefly in the following pages, are almost maddeningly straightforward and unexciting. At the time of its release,
XO
constituted a substantial and logical step forward for Smith, aesthetically and occupation-ally, but it was by no means a sea change, nor was it in any way without precedent or contested by Smith, his label, or the majority of his fan base.

In the canon of Smith’s work,
XO
is notable largely for being his “major label debut”—but that designation is in many ways misleading. In January of 1996, under the guidance of future manager Margaret Mittleman, Smith signed a music publishing deal with publishing giant BMG. Mittleman had made a name for herself in the music industry by signing then-largely-unknown Beck to a similar publishing deal in 1992, and would go on to be Smith’s manager for a substantial portion of his career. Publishing deals such as those struck by Beck and Smith remain largely unexamined in the “major” vs. “indie” discussion, but have had a hand in some of the most creative albums made in the 1990s, including those by Built to Spill and Neutral Milk Hotel.

Rob Schnapf, who is both
XO’s
producer and Mittleman’s husband, describes a publishing deal as follows:

It was sort of like having a bank. You’re selling part of your songs. A company is giving you money—it’s sorta like you’re getting equity out of your songs. So you sell 50% of your songs and you get a bunch of money. Whereas if you owned all of it, the money coming in would be all yours. But when you have a deal, you have to recoup whatever amount was advanced to you, and you share ownership. It’s like a roll of the dice—the wisdom is, if you don’t have to, you don’t do it. But on the other hand it can really be
a great vehicle for helping you do a bunch of artist development type things. Especially if you’re starting from ground zero.

While album royalties are generally thought of as the primary source of income for musicians, song-writing royalties can be much more lucrative, especially in the case of an artist like Smith whose work is played, performed, and covered extensively. Major labels are free to set up extremely unfavorable payment schemes regarding album royalties, but the basic terms of “mechanical” royalties and other songwriting fees are written into US copyright law, and as such are harder for labels to manipulate.

In a sense, then, a publishing deal such as Smith’s necessitates that the artist relinquish a stake in one of his most reliable and potentially lucrative streams of income. But it also pays out in a creatively proactive way; while songwriting royalties can generate a steady flow of cash for an already-successful songwriter, Smith’s publishing deal advanced him a sizeable sum of money in advance of each album’s release ($25-30,000 per independent release and $50,000 per major label release). The timing of the deal, signed years before Smith’s music would take on national prominence, was nothing short of perfect. With a steady salary from BMG, Smith was able to quit his
day job and focus full-time on songwriting. Jackpot! Studio owner Larry Crane, who worked closely with Smith throughout the time that the deal was signed, recalls it having an immediate and noticeable effect on Smith’s songwriting:

I think that as soon as [the publishing deal was signed] he got better. I’m not much of an advocate of speculative music business practices, but it means he could stop doing drywall, doing that kind of work, and focus full-time on writing and recording. That gave us
Either/Or
and most of what later became
New Moon.

Indeed, Smith’s creative output seems to have skyrocketed around the time that the publishing deal was signed. In Steve Hanft’s 1998 documentary
Strange Parallel,
shot while Smith was living in New York City and working on
XO,
Smith succinctly summarized the benefits of being a professional songwriter: “it’s better than laying gravel.”

Smith’s involvement with the world of “major labels” did not end with the BMG publishing deal; Smith’s then-primary creative outlet Heatmiser released their final album
Mic City Sons
on Virgin offshoot Caroline Records in late 1996. The band’s contract with Virgin included a “leaving member clause,” giving the label first dibs on any of Smith’s future solo output. As Smith pointed out in an interview with
Jim
magazine,
Heatmiser’s contract with Virgin rendered it effectively impossible for Smith to continue releasing albums independently; either he would continue to release albums through Virgin, or he would be bought out of his contract by a label with sufficient capital—inevitably, a major.

Thus, while
XO
is the first Elliott Smith solo album to be released by a major label, it isn’t exactly Smith’s “major label debut.” Still, Smith was a well-respected musician with a primarily local following signing to a large national label at a time when such labels were particularly suspect. The post-Nirvana “alternative” afterglow was fading, and many bands that had been signed in its wake were being unceremoniously dropped. If the record industry works in cycles of overenthusiastic speculation and frantic, destructive corrections, then 1997-1998 definitely qualifies as the latter.

In Smith’s case, record industry turmoil may very well have worked to his advantage. In the wake of shake-ups, firings, drops, and mergers among major labels, a handful of smaller major-backed labels began to emerge in 1997, among them
V2
and David Geffen’s DreamWorks. DreamWorks was founded by Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg, and was run by former Warner Brothers A&R giants Lenny Waronker and Mo Ostin, both of whom had been forced out of the label they helped to build. In both its
personnel and its rhetoric, DreamWorks seemed specifically geared toward responding to the rapid-fire successions of signings and droppings by evoking the language of “career artists” and “development.”

Smith was both lucky and smart to sign to DreamWorks at a time when the label had to put their money where their proverbial mouth was. The label’s initial round of signings included artists like Smith, Rufus Wainwright, and Henry Rollins, none of whom were surefire hit makers. In an interview with the Record Labels & Companies Guide Web site, former DreamWorks A&R head Luke Wood described the label’s ethos:

It takes time sometimes for people to reach their full potential. So what they try to do is highlight that potential, identify it, and stick with it. So I think in terms of the A&R process, if something is really great, if you can’t stop thinking about it, then sign it. Work with it. Figure out a way to make it work in the marketplace. That is our number one priority. It’s not rhetoric. It’s not lip service. It’s really the way we do our job here…. With Mo, Michael, and Lenny, it’s the exact same thing. At Warner Brothers, often they would stick with an artist like Neil Young, who would take two or three records to have a commercial hit. But the fact is, they always knew Neil would get to that place. I look at someone like Neil’s career as a blueprint for someone who has ambitious
records—records that are somewhat creatively left of the normal commercial voice—and at the same time he has success. He has an enormous following.

Neil Young is perhaps the musician most commonly invoked in the discourse of the “career artist;” a musician with a large and aesthetically diverse catalog who doesn’t necessarily produce a steady stream of pop radio hits. Of course, this is the rhetoric that
all
major labels tend to deploy, or at least all major label A&R guys. Nobody wants to cop to being part of a soulless marketing strategy, and the A&R guys looking for “career artists” rarely last at their jobs for long. (In 2003, the same year that DreamWorks was declared a financial liability to its parent company and sold off, there was talk of the label signing Backstreet Boy-girlfriend Sarah Martin.)

Still, at the time of Smith’s signing, he was in the enviable position of being an artist genuinely admired by a team of patient, experienced music business veterans who, for the time being, had free rein over their own company. The momentum behind Smith’s signing segued seamlessly into the recording, release, and promotion of
XO.
Between Smith’s publishing deal and his signing to DreamWorks,
XO
is a rare case of the music business doing exactly what it is supposed to do; discovering a remarkably talented artist, providing
financial backing so that artist can focus entirely on his craft, and ultimately bringing that artist’s music to a wider audience. And while the more polished sound of
XO
did raise some eyebrows, all evidence suggests that the album’s immaculate production was in no way a play by any industry force to make Smith more saleable. In an interview with
The Big Takeover,
Smith flatly rejected the insinuation that DreamWorks had any hand in
XO’s
creation:

No, DreamWorks didn’t know what I was going to do in the first place, and they didn’t put any pressure on me at all. I could have made an acoustic record and they would have been fine with that. I think DreamWorks is trying to put out records they actually like. A lot of records get put out by labels just to make a lot of money. But DreamWorks have been really cool to me, so far.

Smith’s “so far” betrays a bit of healthy skepticism; indeed, the suspicion of major label pressure on
XO
is understandable, but is not supported by anybody involved in the album’s making. And, as Larry Crane suggests, any such pressure would have likely doomed the album:

You couldn’t produce him—he wouldn’t have done those records if Rob and Tom had been really heavy-handed…. A lot of times people were like,
“you seem to kind of be at the spot where he was starting to add more to his songs—did you think it was weird?” And I’m like, “did you hear ‘Pictures of Me’?” That and “Cupid’s Trick” and “Christian Brothers”—they don’t use that many elements, but they’re really good arrangements. That was already happening. If you gave him 16 tracks or you gave him 24 tracks, he’d start adding more stuff…. He had a gift for really good arrangement and adding stuff on to the song.

There are some really clueless fuckers out there who hear
XO
and think that Rob and Tom added stuff, or that the label did. I know where those overdubs came from—and I think there are even little bits, like, “Elliott complained about the Beatles piano on ‘Baby Britain,’ and the producers added that.” And it’s like—of course not, he recorded it at Jackpot! With Joanna! That’s
his
part! Nobody was hovering over him telling him how to make this one way or another. Rob and Tom were both very sympathetic producers to work with, and very competent engineers as well. They never would have pushed it in any direction other than what Elliott wanted.

Indeed, the “direction” of
XO
seems to have been determined long before Smith signed to DreamWorks. Schnapf suggests that
Either/Or could
have been a more produced record in the style of
XO;
the decision to hold back had less to do with monetary or time constraints, and more to do with Smith wishing to follow
through the record as it was originally conceived and recorded: