![]() I can hear him in both the quietest and most bombastic recordings of Sufjan Stevens, the yelping, baroque arrangements of Arcade Fire, the soulful six-string confessionals of Julien Baker, and even, perhaps subliminally, in the artfully macabre whispers of Billie Eilish - who, this year, played her own version of the feted but somewhat uncomfortable outsider at the Oscars. ![]() His untimely death inspired some of his musician friends to write songs dedicated to him directly (Ben Folds' 2005 ballad " Late," along with " Ripchord" and " It Just Is" by the LA band Rilo Kiley, the opening act for some of Smith's final shows.) But throughout the aughts, as the Internet brought once-underground veins of emo and indie rock bubbling into the mainstream, Smith's finely crafted, exquisitely melancholy melodies seemed to become manifest in the music of a new generation of musicians. Like that trail of visible sound exploding behind him on the cover of Figure 8, Smith's music has left behind a vivid legacy. (She'll release her second album, Punisher, on June 19.) "I have experienced the thing where people are like, 'Oh, really, you like Elliott Smith? Shocker,' " she says with a laugh, phoning one day from her LA home. Her music - with its evocative lyrics, melodious murmurs and stark, surprising bursts of bleak humor - certainly echoes with his spectral influence. Though she represents a generation that did not get into Smith's music until after his death in October 2003, she's dug deep into the archives to become, in her words, an Elliott Smith nerd. The 25-year-old Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers has listened to this record - and visited the Figure 8 mural - more times than she can count. In the 2014 Smith documentary Heaven Adores You, she recalls summing up to him the idea behind the shot: "What if you are as everyone sees you, and you don't realize that the world is exploding in color behind you?" Autumn de Wilde's iconic cover photo has become the most enduring image of Smith, a be-hoodied everyman standing before a swirling, psychedelic mural. But Smith never crafted quite so immaculate an object of Beatlesque beauty as he did with his ornately melodic 2000 release Figure 8, which celebrates its 20th anniversary on April 18. The fame he began to attract, unwittingly, in the late '90s (culminating with his tender and unforgettable 1998 Oscar performance of Good Will Hunting's "Miss Misery") made that balance even more difficult to achieve. ![]() That tension - between polish and texture, between pop and punk rock, between best-kept-secret and unlikely superstar - never quite found a steady equilibrium throughout Smith's glorious, tumultuous career. So the object is not to stop or arrive anywhere it's just to make this thing as beautiful as they can." But there's something I liked about the image of a skater going in a twisted circle that doesn't have any real endpoint. "I liked the idea of a self-contained, endless pursuit of perfection," he said. ![]() Shortly after the release of his fifth studio album, Figure 8 - the last record he'd finish in his lifetime - Elliott Smith told a Boston Herald writer why he was so drawn to that titular image. Her second album, Punisher, is out in June. Though she only came to his work after his death, Phoebe Bridgers has listened to Elliott Smith's Figure 8 more times than she can count.
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