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This Tuesday we’d like to throw you back into a world full of flannel, body piercings, and folk tunes. No, we’re not talking about present-day Portland or Seattle; the 90′s was a decade swarming with amazing music, and fully deserves to be recognized as such! At the top of our list of 90′s favorites is Elliot Smith, the slightly depressing indie-folk extraordinaire who gained his fame in Portland early on in the decade.
Smith experienced a pretty troubling childhood, which caused him to turn to music for solace. At age nine he began learning piano, and a year later he picked up an acoustic guitar, drawing inspiration from Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and Elvis Costello. “It’s probably pretty easy to put together why somebody who grew up in Texas getting in fights a lot would not want to get up on the stage and start belting out songs at the top of their lungs,” he said to Rolling Stone in 1998. “I’ve had enough of people yelling.”
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He first started out in a rock band called Heatmiser before beginning a solo career a few years later. In 1997 things began to pick up with the release of perhaps his most acclaimed album, Either/Or, which led to a contract with DreamWorks. The late 90′s were very good to him, as Smith then also caught the attention of film director Gus Van Sant, who used “Miss Misery” in the drama Good Will Hunting, achieving him more critical success after it was nominated for an Oscar. He performed the song onstage at the Oscars in 1998.
But Elliott Smith was a no-frills musician. After the performance he was quoted as saying that, ”the Oscars was a very strange show, where the set was only one song cut down to less than two minutes, and the audience was a lot of people who didn’t come to hear me play. I wouldn’t want to live in that world, but it was fun to walk around on the moon for a day.”
At about the same time as he was recording his last album, Smith was experiencing some intense paranoia and even some memory loss and “butterfingers” at live shows; fans and friends alike were growing more concerned with his health, both mentally and physically. He soon checked into rehab, but found it ineffective and stopped going altogether after a few failed attempts. However, he cleaned himself up on his own on his 34th birthday, giving up alcohol, caffeine, red meat, refined sugar, and his (sometimes abused) regimen of medications. Things seemed like they were improving until one fateful night when the tortured soul took his own life.
It was a very sad day for musicians everywhere, but his legacy will continue to live on through his haunting voice and melodies. Take a look at his legendary performance at the Oscars and just bask in the loveliness for a while. It will not disappoint.
