Elliott Smith's XO (6 page)

“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.”

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 of 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.

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.

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.

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.

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