Elliott Smith's XO
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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:
When we were working on Either/Or, there were times when we started to build things up more instrumentally, or talked about doing more elaborate stuff. It could have very easily gone there but this seemed to be a transitional record for Elliott. He saw what it could be but wasn’t yet comfortable with that. So it was sort of a step into the pool as opposed to jumping all the way in.
Schnapf and Tom Rothrock, who would go on to produce XO (and who had co-produced Heatmiser’s swan song Mic City Sons) also produced a good deal of Either/Or, mixing, overdubbing, and at times rebuilding Smith’s songs from scratch. Though it does not immediately resemble the more “hi-fi” XO, Either/Or is similarly rich and varied in texture and instrumentation, a remarkable balancing act between rough-edged material and precise, spacious mixing. I’ve heard some truly stellar live versions of Either/Or opener “Speed Trials,” but the album version (a 4-track recording of Smith’s mixed with Schnapf and Rothrock), with its tape hiss and ringing snare drum, still sounds absolutely perfect.
Smith himself was always a remarkably capable and intuitive engineer, regardless of the limited and inconsistent equipment at his disposal. Smith had amassed a modest collection of microphones and outboard equipment at the house he shared with his bandmates in Heatmiser from the summer of 1995 to the summer of 1996, but interpersonal and creative tensions rendered it a less-than-ideal place to get work done. An extra room at JJ Gonson’s Undercover, Inc space and Smith’s own basement both served as functional places to record, but when Larry Crane opened Jackpot! Recording Studio in February of 1997, it provided Smith with a home base—a comfortable and familiar studio in which Smith could record at his own pace and hone his skill as an engineer. Crane, who had interviewed Smith for his Tape Op ‘zine in 1996 and tracked vocals for “Pictures of Me” that same year at his home studio
, recalls hearing of Smith’s wish to open a space similar to Jackpot!:
Before I started Jackpot!, [Elliott] was talking about “I’ve gotta move into a space and get a 16-track and just be able to work,” so Rebecca Gates [of the Spinanes] put us together and said, “you guys need to talk, because you’re doing the same thing.” I was like, “Oh hey, there’s no reason for us to both build studios and one of them to be empty half the time.” So he helped me find the space and move in our gear. I loved Elliott as a person—when we started off, he was just helping me build this studio and was gonna work out of there and stuff. And we became friends out of that, and to just check everything we started recording his stuff. “Let’s test the 8-track see if that works.”
And those early things, from the first year of operation at Jackpot! were things like “Amity,” “Baby Britain,” “Cecilia/Amanda” and “Miss Misery.” I remember we did demos for a handful of songs, instrumental demos that didn’t have any vocal, where he hadn’t written the lyrics yet. Just sketching stuff out to see if the parts sat together. But I gotta admit, there was never much discussion about whether something was a demo, or if it was for a record. It was just, “hey, do you want to record something?” And I would just try to do the best job that I could. He would sneak in there and do stuff at night—“All Cleaned Out,” “I Didn’t Understand,” stuff that I didn’t even know.
Smith’s busy touring schedule in 1997 did substantially eat into the time he could use to record at Jackpot!. But, according to Crane, that did not stop Smith from continuing to meticulously demo the songs that would become XO:
So he was on tour for weeks, months—and then he came back, threw some stuff in the back of the studio, and then went back on the road. There was little downtime—and I don’t know when and how he would’ve recorded some of these things. That’s what I mean about these [XO] demos. I’m sure he’d be somewhere else, if somebody had home recording equipment or the most rudimentary anything, he’d be like “here’s my chance!”
By the time Smith was signed to DreamWorks in early 1998, he had recorded dozens of demos for the songs that would become XO, and had road-tested many of them as well. When Smith did not have time to demo a song in its entirety, or when the lyrics were not finished when the initial demo was recorded, he would often record two different demos of a song: one bare-bones acoustic and/or electric guitar and vocal demo, and one instrumental demo with full instrumentation. The purpose of the former was to sketch the broad outlines of the song, establishing its melody and chordal structure. The purpose of the latter was to make sure that the instrumental arrangement of each song held its own and worked properly.
Before entering Sunset Sound in early 1998 to commence work on XO, Smith compiled a Digital Audio Tape (DAT) of demo versions, labeled with the album’s earlier title: Grand Mal. (According to the Big Takeover interview, the album was originally to be called XO, but Smith deemed the title too close to Either/Or and renamed it Grand Mal, only to be contacted by a band with that same name and change it back.) The tracklist for this DAT is as follows:
“Waltz #1” Demo
“Better Off Than Dead” [“Sweet Adeline”] Instrumental
“Cecilia/Amanda” Demo
“Anything Is Better Than Nothing” [“New Monkey”] Organ Intro
“Anything Is Better Than Nothing” [“New Monkey”] Instrumental
“I Didn’t Understand” Acoustic Guitar Demo
“Waltz #2” Demo [Full Band]
“Baby Britain” Instrumental
“Amity” Rough Mix
“Memory Lane” Rough Demo
“Bottle Up and Explode” Demo
“Bled White” Acoustic Guitar Demo
“Baby Britain” Acoustic Guitar Demo
“Better Off Than Dead” [“Sweet Adeline”] Acoustic Guitar Demo
Crane suggests that this DAT was likely assembled to give those involved in the making of XO a sense of where the songs were going. An early tracklisting for Grand Mal, dating from prior to the Sunset sessions, offers further insight into Smith’s original conception of the record, in which the two “Waltzes” each kick off a “side” of the record:
“Waltz #1”
“Better Off than Dead” [“Sweet Adeline”]
“Cecilia/Amanda”
“Anything Is Better Than Nothing” [“New Monkey”]
“I Didn’t Understand”
“Waltz #2”
“Baby Britain”
“Amity”
“Memory Lane”
“Bottle Up and Explode”
“Bled White”
Thus, when Smith finally entered the studio to record XO, he was armed not only with an extensive backlog of demo recordings, but with a clear idea of the record he intended to craft as well. Obviously, this initial tracklist changed substantially over the course of recording XO. As it happens, these changes were not often discussed, but rather executed intuitively by Smith over the course of the album’s recording. Crane, who has gone on to record countless bands at Jackpot!, describes how such in-studio discussions are less common than some may think:
I think one perception is that there are a lot of discussions in the studio—but I think that one thing that’s always forgotten is that certain outside factors always dictate what’s going on—and one of those is budget. So you might say, “okay, we’ve got a couple weeks in the studio,” and you have 15 songs or whatever—you just have to get down to work. You can’t sit down and go “how’s this record gonna feel?” In general, you just kinda get to work. You’ve got a budget, you’ve got time, maybe the players are only there for a certain time. And Elliott was always good at just getting to work.
Schnapf echoes this sentiment, suggesting that many of the production choices that went into XO were “natural” to Smith, and were not discussed at length. Indeed, Smith’s approach to writing and recording is not written in conversations—it is written in the work itself. Part of what makes Smith’s body of work so immersive—and part of what made researching this book feel like an archaeological dig—is that the clues to his creative process lie buried in an impressive pile of demos, outtakes, and live recordings.
Smith’s reworking of XO continued right up until its release. On June 15, 1998, when the majority of recording for XO had already taken place, the album was prepared for mastering with the following tracklist:
“Tomorrow, Tomorrow”
“Waltz #2”
“Baby Britain”
“Pitseleh”
“Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands”
“Bled White”
“Waltz #1”
“Amity”
“Oh Well, Okay”
“Bottle Up and Explode”
“A Question Mark”
“Sweet Adeline”
“I Didn’t Understand”
Noticeably absent from this sequence is “Independence Day,” the result of a later session intended to produce b-sides for the record. (This session also produced Figure 8 highlight “Happiness,” as well as the instrumental b-side “Our Thing.”)
Imagining XO with this tracklist speaks to how effective its final sequencing is; while “I Didn’t Understand” retains its logical place at the record’s end, “Sweet Adeline” makes little sense as the album’s penultimate track, and the epic coda of “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands” stands to be a momentum-killer so close to the album’s start. According to Crane, Smith struggled with XO’s sequencing, and ultimately enlisted the help of his close friend and one-time girlfriend Joanna Bolme to finalize the album’s running order.
The culmination of a year-long process of writing, recording, and reworking, XO was released by DreamWorks Records on August 25, 1998.
XO Song by Song
Though Elliott Smith was never particularly interested in discussing his own music, he did often speak about the music he enjoyed. When interviewed about Elvis Costello for a VH1 special, Smith described him as someone who �
��really likes words.” In a 1998 interview with Interview magazine, Smith described his own songwriting process in similar terms:
[I like] music, just the sound of things. That’s my favorite thing. I love words and it’s good to love words if you are going to sing them, but the bottom line is the way something sounds. Sometimes I’ll compromise a lyric before I’ll compromise the way something sounds, even though I hate doing that.
Of course, every songwriter has a different idea of what “sounds good.” Some favor lyrics that operate smoothly and seamlessly within tightly structured songs, others favor lyrics that expand, destabilize, and rupture their musical context. Smith definitely falls into the former category, thriving within the formal constraints of pop music. The majority of actual language Smith utilizes is the bread and butter of pop songwriting: “head,” “love,” “picture,” ambiguous “you”s and “she”s, etc. Many of Smith’s lyrics are so seamless—so formally and linguistically unobtrusive—that they easily go by unnoticed, failing to register as lyrics, let alone the kind that warrant any sort of analysis.
Thus, upon a cursory listen, Smith’s craft and discipline threaten to read as a simple lack of sophistication. The opposite is, in fact, true—the more outwardly unassuming Smith’s lyrics are, the more likely it is that those lyrics are the result of countless revisions and reworkings. When asked by The Big Takeover whether he works on making his lyrics more “song-like,” Smith responded: “More ‘song-like’ to me equals more speaking-like. I like, if possible, to write the way that people actually speak. That’s why when people bring up comparisons to poetic singer/songwriters it gets on my nerves. I don’t feel as flowery!”
Smith’s skepticism toward the “poetic singer/songwriter” figure goes beyond a simple distaste for “flowery” language. In a frequently Myspace’d May 1998 interview with a Dutch TV station, Smith described his wariness toward “manipulative” lyrics:
The thing that’s kind of a drag about the singer-songwriter tag is that it has this connotation of being super-sentimental, kinda manipulative lyrically, as if the person singing is trying to get everybody to feel just like them. But there’s a big difference between describing … I mean, you take a picture of New York and one person will look at it and think that it’s really depressing and frightening, and another person will look at it and think of all the fun things you could do … I think songs are kind of like that.