From this place of detachment, Smith is able to articulate many of XO’s recurring themes. In the song’s second verse, he once again speaks to the dangers of the past:
Now she’s done and they’re calling someone—such a familiar name
I’m so glad that my memory’s remote
’cause I’m doing just fine, hour to hour, note to note
The change from “I recognize the name” to “such a familiar name” playfully invokes the familial element of Smith’s memory (familiar / familial), but also enriches the word “calling” (calling someone for their turn to sing a song vs. calling someone a name via that song). Smith’s assertion that he’s “doing just fine, hour to hour, note to note” does not suggest the same self-delusion as “it’s okay, it’s alright, nothing’s wrong,” owing in part to the lyrics that precede it, and in part to the subtle expressive cues of Smith’s performance. It is well in keeping with the lyrical constructs of XO that the distance of memory would allow for things to be—however tenuously and temporarily—“just fine.”
As Smith honed the lyrics to “Waltz #2,” his delivery developed as well; the transition from “I recognize the name” to “such a familiar name” omits the awkward pickup of the “I,” emphasizing the upward dynamic of the line even in acoustic performances. In the earliest live versions of “Waltz #2,” “stares into space like a dead china doll” is sung with a choppy, metered cadence; “stares into space [pause] like a dead [pause] china doll.” By an August 1998 performance in Oregon, the first half of the line is delivered more smoothly, and by a May 1998 performance at Portland’s La Luna, while the recording of XO was well underway, the line is delivered more closely to how it is sung on the record. Though the seamless phrasing of XO seems natural and easy, it is the end result of a long process of revision, trial, and error.
Musically, the basics of “Waltz #2” do not seem to have changed much over the song’s numerous lyrical revisions. In an interview with Guitar Player, Smith described his affinity for the type of chord change that gives life to “Waltz #2”:
I’m kind of a sucker for passing chords, such as when you play a progression like G, D with an F# in the bass, and F. There’s a half-step, descending melody in those types of sequences that I love. The Beatles did that a lot. And that’s what I really like about traditional music. There are ways in which the chords connect to each other—where certain notes only move a little bit while the main notes move a lot. Anything that has an ascending or descending half-step thing in it always ropes me in.
The progression in “Waltz #2”’s chorus from an F to a C with an E in the bass highlights just such a half-step descending melody, adding a sense of fragile tension to Smith’s vocal line. Smith’s piano part, echoing his vocal melody and anticipating the song’s rhythmic ebbs and flows, further develops its sense of momentum. “Waltz #2” ’s arrangement clearly evokes a live band, but as the song’s only performer, Smith was free to arrange as he saw fit without bruising anybody’s ego; instruments could come and go to suit the song, without concern for what the drummer would do during the quiet parts.
“Baby Britain”
“Baby Britain” is one of two songs on XO that was recorded primarily at Jackpot! during the sessions that produced numerous XO demos and b-sides. Initially, engineering credit was given to Crane, but “Baby Britain” was in fact tracked by Smith’s then-girlfriend Joanna Bolme. (Bolme, who was learning recording techniques from Smith and Crane at the time, would go on to engineer a number of albums at Jackpot! herself.) Indeed, the instrumental tracks themselves are not quite as hi-fi as the majority of XO, but in Schnapf’s words, “the vibe was there.”
“Baby Britain” is an unsparing character sketch dressed up as an immaculate, Beatlesque pop song. Over bouncy piano chords and guitar stabs, Smith introduces us to the song’s titular character:
Baby Britain feels the best floating over a sea of vodka
Separated from the rest, fights problems with bigger problems
Sees the ocean fall and rise, counts the waves that somehow didn’t hit her
Water pouring from her eyes, alcoholic and very bitter
The imagery expands and contracts; vodka forms a sea, problems are fought with bigger problems, the ocean falls and rises, tears pour from Baby Britain’s eyes. A similar dynamic is utilized in the song’s second verse, which evokes the miniature (“dead soldiers lined up on the table”) and the monumental (“London bridge”). It is worth noting that Smith sings the line “fall and rise” to a melody that first descends and then ascends. In both his lyrics and his melodies, Smith displays a keen awareness of movement and scale; even as it throbs and undulates, “Baby Britain” is unerringly exact.
The song’s chorus offers perhaps the best possible example of Smith’s formal discipline contrasting his lyrical incisiveness—“for someone half as smart / you’d be a work of art” is an extremely simple and palatable couplet, to the point where it can easily pass by unnoticed. But it is a scathing sentiment, and one that echoes the themes of responsibility (and lack thereof) that permeate the song and the record at large. Similarly, the closing line of the chorus—“I can’t help you until you start”—alludes to the futility of trying to help somebody who is not amenable to such intervention—a theme that Smith revisits extensively later in XO.
As with many of Smith’s songs (including “Between the Bars” and “Cecilia/Amanda”), “Baby Britain” tells of a character who fails to live up to her potential. In an interview with The Big Takeover, Smith articulated a view on these matters that is at both sympathetic and pragmatic:
I think no one ever lives up to their potential, and that’s not a negative thing, though it sounds like that in my songs. I mean, it does burn me out sometimes. But it’s impossible to live up to your potential in this world because if you can, potential itself is not worth very much. People are infinitely more capable than what they end up showing.
In other words, potential is valuable only because it always exceeds that which is actually accomplished—if we all lived up to our potential, the very concept of “potential” would cease to exist. This view likely accounts in part for Smith’s creative restlessness and commendable work ethic; however close he came to fully realizing his artistic goals, there was always room to grow and work to be done.
“Baby Britain” was released as the second single from XO, in a slightly remixed version that retains its backbeat through every chorus. (Judging from the version I have, the single is also mastered slightly louder than XO, a necessary concession to radio airplay that thankfully was not applied to the album itself.) The decision to release an edited version of “Baby Britain” could be seen as a disruptive artistic intervention on behalf of DreamWorks, but if anything, it seems inconsequentially misguided. At worst, the changes made to “Baby Britain” simply compromise one of the many structural elegances of a song that is still irresistible whether writ large or examined in detail.
“Pitseleh”
In both its tone and its placement on XO, “Pitseleh” always strikes me as an interesting counterpoint to “Between the Bars,” a song occupying a similar spot on Either/Or. In terms of sheer ubiquity, “Between the Bars” seems to have surpassed “Miss Misery” as Elliott Smith’s most popular song. And it is definitely among his best. But, as with “Baby Britain,” its formal perfection masks its emotional complexity. In the song’s central lyrical conceit, Smith is the one on the outside of the bars, looking in. Many have interpreted the line “drink up, baby” to mean that the song is “about” substance abuse, but as is often the case in Smith’s writing, the drink itself is just a means to an end. “Between the Bars” is a song about using emotional intelligence as a mechanism of control; of maintaining and perpetuating a dysfunctional relationship for the power it gives you.
In its chorus, “Between the Bars” imitates a love song, but reveals a startling darkness underneath:
The people you’ve been before that you don’t w
ant around anymore
They push and shove and won’t bend to your will
I’ll keep them still
One can choose to read a comma before the word “still,” but either way, this chorus is not a lover’s sweet and generous offer of understanding, nor does it somehow defer responsibility onto the specter of alcoholism. It is intimate, but horribly so—a gesture of control in which a person’s past selves are maintained and manipulated by their partner. Whether Smith is promising to “keep them still” or “keep them, still,” he is still promising to keep them around.
In a sense, “Pitseleh” can be read as the aftermath of “Between the Bars,” a cautionary tale written in hindsight that implicitly warns of the dangers that can come of accepting emotional responsibility for another. Lyrically, it is one of the most strikingly direct and sad songs Smith has written. The song’s evocative opening couplet: “I’ll tell you why I don’t want to know where you are / I’ve got a joke I’ve been dying to tell you” is mirrored and elucidated by a line later in the song: “I was bad news for you just because / I never meant to hurt you.” The two halves of this line can either be read independently or as part of one clause. One way the song speaks to the dangers of good intentions, the other it speaks to the arbitrary nature of bad outcomes.
Noticeably absent from “Pitseleh” is the word “sorry,” which seems to be the shortest way to encapsulate the tension between “I never meant to hurt you” and “I was bad news for you.” The closest Smith comes to an outright apology is the decidedly impersonal “no one deserves it.” It is rather shocking for a song utilizing the aesthetic most commonly associated with the “singer-songwriter” to reject the notion of interpersonal causality, the ideological core of any “I did you wrong” or “you did me wrong” song. Indeed, throughout XO, Smith grapples with the question of whether or not anyone can really help or hurt anyone else. In the song’s second verse, Smith masterfully relinquishes his own position in this equation: “I’m not what’s missing from your life now / I could never be the puzzle pieces.” This is not a matter of simple self-deprecation—it is a rejection of the romantic illusion that one person can rescue another, an illusion that sees its dark and destructive outcome in “Between the Bars.”
Smith’s assertion that “no one deserves it” ushers in one of the most jaw-dropping musical moments on XO, a swirling piano solo that combines the melodic strength of Smith’s vocal with the rhythmic intensity of his guitar part; flawlessly transposed, as Smith was given to doing, for the particular timbre and rhythmic response of the piano. Schnapf and Rothrock’s sonic treatment suits the song perfectly: a storm in a teacup, at once cathartic and heartbreakingly muted.
According to both Crane and Schnapf, “Pitseleh” is one of the songs on XO that seemed to emerge out of nowhere in the studio, with no demos or live performances preexisting its recording. Smith never talked much about “Pitseleh” in interviews, and rarely performed it. Some recall hearing him say that it was “too long and boring,” or that it was a “lyrics-based song” which he didn’t feel translated well live. The more romantic interpretation of these facts is that Smith held the song to be of particular personal significance. The less romantic (and, considering Smith’s practical attitudes toward creativity, more likely) interpretation is that, given the lack of revision the song saw before it was recorded, Smith felt that the song was musically undercooked.
“Independence Day”
“Independence Day” was the last song recorded for XO, the product of a later session that was intended to provide b-sides for the record’s singles. Aesthetically, the obvious difference between “Independence Day” and the rest of XO is its reliance upon a drum loop, credited in the album’s liners to co-producer Tom Rothrock. In a sense, the loop proves to be an interesting challenge for Smith—while many of the songs on XO depend on percussion to articulate their structural arcs (or operate nimbly within the structural absences afforded by a lack of percussion), “Independence Day” relies primarily on chord changes and subtle layering to give the song its shape.
“Independence Day” is at its strongest before the drum loop even begins. Smith had a knack for writing acoustic guitar intros that masterfully foreshadow the overall feel and arc of a song (“The Ballad of Big Nothing” from Either/Or stands out in this regard), and “Independence Day” opens with one of his finest. Coming out of “Pitseleh,” the opening bars of “Independence Day” seem intentionally vague and transitory, hinting at a transformation without revealing its end result (mirroring the lyrical image of a “future butterfly”). When the vocal melody from the song’s chorus materializes, it becomes clear that we have left the hushed introspection of “Pitseleh;” we have emerged into daylight (where we will remain for both “Independence Day” and “Bled White”).
Given its last-minute creation, “Independence Day” is perhaps not as lyrically developed as the rest of XO; the rhyming of “today” with “day,” and “ooh” with “you” are the kind of lyrical fallbacks that Smith tended to excise when revising his work. That said, “Independence Day” is a welcome addition to the album’s flow; a laid-back and fairly optimistic song sandwiched between the wrenching “Pitseleh” and the defiant “Bled White.”
“Bled White”
Originally entitled “Crush Blind” and then “Poor White,” “Bled White” has a rich and illuminating history. The song was recorded twice at Jackpot!: once on 8-track and once on 16-track. The earlier of these two recordings (then called “Crush Blind”) is the most markedly different; while the song’s chords and melody are as they will later appear, the song is accompanied by an unmemorable monophonic keyboard line (played, according to Crane, on a Hammond L102 organ), and does not have the call and response vocals that make its verses so lively and dynamic.
The lyrical reworking of “Bled White” is among Smith’s most thorough and skillful. In its earliest incarnations, the bridge of “Bled White” presents us with a series of observations and references, both general and specific:
Who’s the girl with the blank expression?
Everyone’s trying to put someone to shame.
But happiness pulls you the other direction,
Going to Pioneer Square to watch it rain.
The association of “happiness” and “watching it rain” seems at once too easy and too heavy-handed to meet Smith’s rigorous standards. In a slightly later live version (from March of 1997), this line has been rewritten:
Who’s the girl with the blank expression?
Everyone’s looking for someone they can blame.
But happiness pulls me in my direction,
Going to Pioneer Square to find your name.
As with many early incarnations of Smith’s lyrics, this intermediate version of the bridge reads like an evocative yet disconnected sequence of isolated lines. It is only when the recording of XO is already well underway that the final version of the bridge begins to take shape:
Here he comes with the blank expression
Especially for me ’cause he knows I feel the same
’Cause happy and sad come in quick succession
I’m never going to become what you became
As in many of Smith’s lyrics, the bridge of “Bled White” is host to a remarkably complex play of subjects. Here he comes with the blank expression, “especially” (implying the presence—if not physical—of others as well) for me because he knows that I share the feeling behind that expression. “I’m never going to become what you became” is a remarkably bold and assured line, bolstered and contextualized by the newfound narrative continuity of the bridge. When the snare drum picks up at the line’s end, you can almost see Smith confidently trotting off from the encounter that he has just described with his inimitable combination of emotional specificity and situational vagueness.
The verse immediately following the bridge is telling as well:
Don’t you dare disturb me
(Don’t complicate my peace o
f mind) While I’m balancing my past
(Don’t complicate my peace of mind)
’Cause you can’t help or hurt me
(Faith in me, baby’s just a waste of time)
Like it already has
I may not seem quite right
But I’m not fucked, not quite
This verse treads familiar thematic ground, describing the precariousness of the past, and how the attempt to “balance” that past can leave beyond help or harm from others (again, the “airless cell”). Just as the song’s bridge grew bolder and more confident, the final line of this verse grew more optimistic—in the song’s earliest demo, Smith sang “if you think I’m fucked, you’re right.”
Interestingly, Crane recalls that the response vocals as they appeared on XO were written last-minute while Smith was already well into recording at Sunset. Extant demos and live recordings seem to support this; in the second studio demo of “Bled White,” Smith simply repeats “white city on the 409,” and response vocals are entirely absent from every live performance of “Bled White” through the recording of XO. The use of the phrase “waste of time” to end multiple lines, and the repetition of “white city on the yellow line” in the song’s first and second verses seem a bit sloppy and arbitrary given the meticulous specificity of the song’s lead vocal. But this slight air of randomness succeeds in giving these lines a different voice, enhancing the song’s call-and-response structure.
Elliott Smith's XO Page 4
