Elliott Smith's XO

by LeMay, Matthew

  Along with “Independence Day,” “Bled White” is one of the most upbeat songs on XO. Blackness and darkness permeate the record and while, according to Crane, the lack of color in “Bled White” has its origins in Smith’s skeptical eye toward gentrification, it ultimately casts “Bled White” as one of XO’s few daytime songs. If blackness is the place where the writer isolates himself, “Bled White” the song of a “color reporter,” walking around a city and taking it in. Notably, it is the only song on XO where action and observation seem concurrent, perhaps because it is a song rooted in the action of observing.

  “Bled White” is one of two songs on XO on which Smith did not play drums. According to Schnapf, Smith was having trouble getting the feel of the song just right, and opted to enlist sometimes-Beck drummer Joey Waronker (son of DreamWorks exec Lenny, and original drummer for the mighty Walt Mink) instead. Smith was without a doubt a capable drummer, but his particular style was more steady and “heavy” than nimble and propulsive—on “Waltz #2,” you can almost feel the bulk of the drum sticks. “Bled White” and “Bottle Up and Explode” are the only two songs on XO in which the drum part is not rhythmically anticipated by another instrument, be it bass, guitar or piano—in effect, the only two songs where Smith’s style of drumming would fail to drive the song forward as needed. Though Smith wrote “Bled White” and played drums on multiple demo recordings, he was ultimately able to distance the song itself from his own role in creating it, and to work—as always—in the service of the former.

  “Waltz #1”

  According to Crane, “Waltz #1” was temporarily titled “Bushmill’s,” “[having] more to do with a hangover than anything.” As such, the song’s placement on XO is apt; a hazy, disoriented comedown after the propulsive and tightly wound “Bled White.”

  An early version of “Waltz #1,” recorded by Crane at Jackpot!, has been frequently circulated as a b-side and a compilation track. Musically, it is very similar to the version recorded for XO. Its lyrics are host to only a handful of notable changes, the first of which occurs midway through the song. (“Waltz #1” does not really have “verses” or “choruses” to speak of.) In the Jackpot! recording, Smith sings:

  I thought you knew

  Now I take it from the top and make the repetition stop

  It never ever went away

  On XO, the first two lines are combined:

  Going through every out I used to cop to make the repetition stop

  What was I supposed to say?

  In both cases, Smith cleverly intones “repetition stop” at the very moment when the song’s repeating musical figure momentarily subsides. Smith’s revision of the verse highlights the brief silence that follows it; “what was I supposed to say?” omits both the lyric that downplays the previous line’s cleverness (for a moment the musical repetition did, in fact, go away) and the awkward pickup syllable “it.”

  The second notable change occurs immediately after the break. In the Jackpot! version, Smith sings “now I’m scared to leave my zone—we’re both alone—I’m coming home.” On XO, the line becomes “Now I never leave my zone—we’re both alone—I’m going home.” (The “zone” in “Waltz #1” parallels the “place where I make no mistakes” in “Waltz #2,” and “the safety of a pitch-black mind” in “Oh Well, Okay.”) The change from “coming home” to “going home” speaks to the precision of Smith’s word choice; one slight directional shift substantially alters the sense of place conjured by the song as a whole. “Coming home” implies that the person you’re addressing is already there; “going home” removes that implicit third party and its resultant sense of connection and grounded-ness, reinforcing the free-floating and amorphous feel of the song itself.

  Notably, “Waltz #1” is the only song on XO that fades out; the “repetition,” it turns out, doesn’t stop after all.

  “Amity”

  Like “Baby Britain,” “Amity” was mostly tracked at Jackpot!, engineered by Larry Crane. It is by far the most “lo-fi” song on XO. According to Crane, there was a problematic degree of bleed in the drum microphones; to remedy this, Schnapf and Rothrock created a sample of the snare drum from a part of the song where Smith plays primarily on the ride cymbal, then triggered this sample during the parts of the song where the hi-hat was problematically loud in the snare mic.

  In the Big Takeover interview, Smith describes “Amity” not as a love song, but rather as a sort of self-examination brought about by the presence of another:

  It’s a really unguarded song—I made up the lyrics in a couple of minutes and didn’t change them. I like the way it feels, although it’s not an especially deep song at all. It’s, I don’t know … just a big rock song. It’s a pretty simple song. It’s not so much about the words themselves, but more about how the whole thing sounds. Some friends of mine said it sounded like I was trying to get something romantic going with someone, and that’s not what it was supposed to be about. It was supposed to be, “you’re really fun to be with and I really like you a lot because of that, but I am really, really depressed.” But I don’t know if that came across. When I said, “ready to go,” it was supposed to mean tired of living…. I was saying, “I really like you and it’s really great to hang out with someone who is happy and easy-going, but I don’t feel like that and I can’t be with you.”

  The spontaneity of “Amity” is evident from the almost-hypnotic repetition of its subject’s name that opens the song. “Amity” is host to some of the most contrived and unrefined lines in Smith’s oeuvre; “God don’t make no junk,” “’Cause you laugh and talk, and ’cause you make my world rock”—but this is no accident. Throughout “Amity,” Smith sounds almost drunk on the presence of the song’s subject. His openness and exuberance, expressed in part through the very absence of his characteristic precision—are what make the song so compelling and infectious.

  … That is, until the song’s sobering final line; a comedown in which “good to go” (a line that, to my ears, reveals none of the fatalism that Smith intended) is appended with the word “home.” The giddy drunkenness of “Amity” ends the same as the disoriented drunkenness of “Waltz #1”; going home, alone. If Smith intended for “ready to go” to mean “ready to die,” he effectively undermined himself by casting the song’s final moment as such a dramatic downturn.

  Even the spontaneous and urgent “Amity” was masterfully enhanced and honed during the mixing of XO. In an earlier mix consisting entirely of tracks from the Jackpot! session, the squalling electric guitar note ringing out over the second half of the song’s second verse is mixed noticeably louder, enhancing the song’s texture but ultimately distracting from Smith’s vocal. Similarly, the song’s verses originally contained prominent vocal harmonies by Smith and friend/collaborator Pete Krebs on the lines “open all the time” and “make my world rock,” very pleasant in their own right but ultimately disruptive to the song’s immersive effect, calling attention to its artifice and creating a sense of distance from Smith’s absorbing lead vocal. At Sunset, Smith and Krebs’ harmonies were reworked and rerecorded much more subtly by Smith himself, the bass part from the Jackpot! session was retracked, and understated strings were added into the mix. Even as Smith was given greater means to record, he remained remarkably sensitive to how sonically pleasing studio flourishes could work against a song’s nature; the process of arranging XO was hardly just one of piling on.

  “Oh Well, Okay”

  Aside from “Independence Day,” “Oh Well, Okay” appears to be the last song Smith completed for XO, having demoed the song with Crane at Jackpot! on March 31, 1998. In an interview with Interview magazine, Smith described the song as his favorite on the record, for that very reason:

  My favorite is the newest one, since I haven’t heard it as many times as some of the others. It’s called “Oh Well, Okay.” It’s slow and quiet and sort of describes a silhouette of someone. It would sound ridiculous to talk about it too much, but essentially it’
s about how a silhouette is permanently turned away from you. The person is being described as if they were this photograph. And they weren’t always turned away from me, but now they are and they seem to stay like that. It’s kind of a sad song.

  Smith introduces this “photograph” in the song’s second verse:

  I got pictures, I just don’t see it anymore

  Climbing hour upon hour through a total bore

  With the one I keep where it never fades

  In the safety of a pitch black mind

  An airless cell that blocks the day

  The use of plural “pictures” and the singular “it” makes it clear that it is not the pictures themselves that Smith can no longer see; as in “Sweet Adeline,” pictures cannot fully stand in for that which they represent. Here, once again, the future—in which the picture threatens to fade—is figured as dangerous and threatening, combated as in “Tomorrow, Tomorrow” by the negation of the present. (That fear of the future is itself predicated upon a need to preserve the past, even as a memento of the past fails to capture its subject.) “Climbing hour upon hour through a total bore” is a great example of Smith’s tendency to spatialize emotional conceits, and of his lyrical precision: to bore is the opposite of to climb.

  As with “Pitseleh,” “Oh Well, Okay” is host to an instrumental solo that subtly but powerfully refigures its vocal melody. In this case, it is a hazy slide guitar solo, which injects a physically palpable pause into the vocal melody Smith sings as “always turned away” and “see it anymore.” One of Smith’s greatest talents as an instrumentalist was his ability to write guitar parts that seem to breathe; unencumbered by words, Smith’s guitar transforms the melody of “Oh Well, Okay” into the heavy sigh of its title.

  “Bottle Up and Explode!”

  Though Heatmiser recorded numerous times at pro studios in Portland, an early version of “Bottle Up and Explode!” is among the first of Smith’s solo songs to be tracked in a professional recording environment, the product of a session with Greg Di Gesu at Waterfront Studios in Hoboken, New Jersey on March 25 and 26, 1996. Di Gesu recalls how Smith carried over the methodology he developed recording at home:

  [Waterfront] was a reputable studio, and I think it was different from the approaches he had been doing when he was recording at home. He was doing all the parts here too, tracking vocals, adding drums, two or three guitar tracks, bass. But I think ultimately he was still transitioning to that kind of a situation. He came out on publishing money, and we had a really really good time and a good connection together. But I think there’s a certain apprehension in the recordings, in the performance. When we worked together, he worked. He would get his guitar part, listen back, make sure everything was ok, then he’d do the second part. Keith, my assistant engineer at the time, called today, and he reminded me of some good things: he remembers that Elliott would want me to put rough mixes on cassette, and he’d put them on his Walkman. The studio sat on a river, and he’d go out there, smoke cigarettes, and listen to the stuff. It seemed like he used the methodology that he had used in the past, where he knows what worked for him. But I still think that being in a control room with a huge Trident A Range [mixing board] was very different for him.

  In the version of “Bottle Up and Explode!” recorded by Di Gesu, Smith’s guitar is tuned down and—as Di Gesu suggests—his vocal performance uncertain. The resultant recording is at once sweeter and more ominous than the version that made it onto XO. Ultimately, though, the decision to transpose “Bottle Up and Explode!” to a higher key suited the song well; the song of Smith’s voice edging up toward the top of his range better evokes the emotional dynamic of the song’s title.

  As one of the older songs on XO, “Bottle Up and Explode” went through a series of interesting lyrical changes. The version recorded by Di Gesu, and concurrent live versions, demonstrate a marked difference in the song’s second verse:

  She looks at him like he’s never known her—

  It’s only been a year and half.

  Thinking that that was a matter of fact.

  Thinking that he was about to come over,

  I’ve been standing up waiting for you—you never showed.

  By November of 1997, the opening lyrics of the verse have been altered:

  You look at him like you don’t want to know him,

  But I know in the past that you have.

  The opening of two concurrent lines with the words “thinking that” is the type of repetition that Smith tended to edit out when revising his work. On the final version of XO, the verse has changed substantially from its original form:

  You look at him like you’ve never known him,

  But I know for a fact that you have.

  The last time you cried who’d you think was inside?

  Thinking that you were about to come over,

  But I’m tired now of waiting for you—you never show.

  In his review of XO, John Darnielle—a tremendously accomplished lyricist in his own right—eloquently described the unassuming brilliance of this verse:

  One of my favorite lines in the song goes: “You look at him like you’ve never known him/But I know for a fact that you have.” It’s the line that leads off the song’s second verse, coming out of nowhere at all. The first verse had been a solitary affair uncluttered by second parties. You and I both know the sentiment behind such a line; it requires no explication. The acrid taste it leaves in your mouth speaks for itself. What’s unusual here is that since the feeling behind such a line is self-evident, its author offers no narrative detail of any kind to flesh it out for you. The song is a laundry list of words and phrases that prick at very specific emotional centers, but which add up to virtually nothing—they are like a dream of a song rather than an actual song…. To find such painterly writing framed by the pleasant, palatable music that we find here is nothing short of alarming.

  Similarly, Smith’s description of the colors “red, white, blue” is intentionally presented without narrative context. In the Big Takeover interview, Smith described how this line was specifically meant to trigger the listener’s imagination:

  I was thinking about fireworks exploding. It could be a celebration, but then again, it could be something bad. I just try and make connections between things. I’m not so interested in telling complete stories anymore—now I like it better if the songs are like abstract movies…. The song won’t complete itself without someone activating their imagination. The music is supposed to do that. A lot of my favorite songs are ones that aren’t complete without me finishing them in my head.

  Here, Smith summarizes why it can be so hard to say what exactly his songs are “about” even as, in Darnielle’s words, they “prick at very specific emotional centers.” The closing lines of “Bottle Up and Explode!”—“I’ll make it outside / I’ll get through becoming you”—operate on a similar principle; we never learn who “you” refers to, but the way Smith repeats “becoming you” over the song’s coda requires no explanation.

  “A Question Mark”

  In a video interview for Musician.com, Smith describes his songwriting as follows: “I don’t really think about it in terms of language, I think about it more like shapes.” He then goes on to play “A Question Mark”; a perfect fit, seeing as the song’s spare opening notes seem to paint that very punctuation mark. In that same interview, Smith goes on to say “I’m really into chord changes. That was the thing I liked when I was a kid. So I’m not like a … I don’t make up a ‘riff really. It’s usually like … That sequence has some implied melody in it or something like that.”

  “A Question Mark” proves exemplary in this respect; the chord voicings in its verse contain almost all of the song’s melodic turns, several of which actually get subsumed by a bass saxophone part in version recorded for XO. The decision to prominently feature the bass saxophone (and to include an unaccompanied snippet of it at the end of “Bottle up and Explode!”) makes for a substantial and welcome t
extural shift in the flow of XO, but obscures some of “A Question Mark” ’s innate musical logic. The instrumental demo of “A Question Mark,” recorded by Crane at Jackpot on January 13, 1998, places the horn part (played on guitar) farther back in the mix, allowing more room for the major 3rds in Smith’s nimble guitar part to sketch the song’s basic melody.

  “A Question Mark” not only restates Smith’s belief in uncertainty, but also associates the illusion of certainty with “hatred.” Smith wrote many songs that suggest that, in the words of Larry Crane, “things that you think are one way … are actually another way.” “A Question Mark” is Smith’s “things that you think are one way can’t be simplified to any one way at all” song:

  I’ve got a question mark

  You’ve got a need to always take some shot in the dark

  I don’t have to make pretend the picture I’m in is totally clear

  You think that all things have a way they ought to appear

  ’Cause you know, you know, you know, you know

  You know, I don’t, I dream

  Don’t know what you mean

  The end of the song’s second verse lays out the dangers of the causal mindset Smith implicitly rejects in “Pitseleh”:

  You’re giving back a little hatred now to the world

  ’Cause it treated you bad

  ’Cause you couldn’t keep the great unknown from making you mad

  Here, the attempt to fix meaning is seen as a vengeful act; an outlook that seems to inform Smith’s lyrics in approach as well as content. As with many songs on XO, “A Question Mark” reveals much of its hand during its bridge, in which the song finally resolves to the G major chord it has been hinting at since its first notes:

  Said your final word, but honesty and love could’ve kept us together

  One day you’ll see it’s worth it after all