An Elliott Smith Compulsion....

I don't know what it is, but for the past week I've been on a strange and nostalgic Elliott Smith music kick. It all started I suppose when I was listening to an online indie radio station and an Eric Matthews cover of "Needle in the Hay" came on. Then I remembered just how much I love that song, and that album in fact--his first self-titled one. Hence I decided it was time to go back and compile a playlist of Elliott Smith tunes and I was sucked in from there. Although his work was sometimes a bit hit or miss, there was always at least one song on each album that I really loved and my playlist at the moment is fairly long. He was incredibly prolific in spite of a life cut short too soon.

Indeed, this nostalgic music kick comes with a lingering sense of sadness. His suicide at the age of 34 was a tragic loss for so many reasons. The man had a truly lovely and melodious voice. And he really communicated passionate and earnest (sometimes desperate) longing in his songs with a bittersweetness that always leaves you straddling the precarious edge between joy and misery at the end of his songs. He also had a witty and sarcastic sense of humor that is often deceptively obscured by his quiet but melifluous voice.

It always seems even more supremeley tragic to me when an artist dies, especially at a young age. They leave behind a gaping hole of possibilities that will never be--their absence haunting us with the ghostly impression of an artistic incompleteness that can never be resolved. And with Elliott Smith, I mourn him and the songs he still had left to sing.