Elliott Smith's XO (8 page)

To a pure synthetic sympathy that infuriates you totally

And a quiet lie that makes you wanna scream and shout.

“A chemical embrace that kicks you in the head” is a prime example of Smith’s use of substance abuse imagery to describe a force (like a romantic “embrace”) that overrides intellect and rational thought. The language of chemical dependence is also implied in the wonderfully alliterative phrase “pure synthetic sympathy.” Similarly, Smith’s use of the word “pushing” in every performance of “Everybody Cares” prior to its final recording is a thought-provoking recontextualization of drug abuse terminology. But while the idea of the sun as a “pusher” is intriguing, it ultimately seems incongruous with
XO
at large. Throughout the album, the sun is often presented as a figure whose light threatens to penetrate the “endless cell that blocks the day,” that reoccurring place of safety and isolation that is, itself, associated with drug use (even when—as in
XO
outtake “New Monkey”—it is also positioned as a place of creativity.) When a “fully loaded” Smith “[stares] down the sun” in “Sweet Adeline,” it is not the sun that is rendering him “deaf and dumb and done.”

The finale of “Everybody Cares” is the most instrumentally dense portion of
XO,
building layer upon layer of what Schnapf calls “sprinkles,” including keyboard work by Smith’s friend and collaborator Jon Brion. It is a deft musical literalization of the song’s conceit; immediately following Smith’s warning to “stay the hell way,” here is “everybody,” a dizzying array of instrumental voices that grows overbearing and menacing as it builds.

In the earliest live versions of the “I Didn’t Understand”, Smith sings over a characteristically spindly acoustic guitar part. In a preliminary recording of the song, widely circulated among fans on the “Jackpot Sessions” compilation, Smith accompanies himself on piano. For
XO,
Smith ran with an idea of Schnapf’s, born of repeat listens to the Beach Boys’
Pet Sounds Sessions
box set:

I was listening to a lot of Beach Boys, and I heard a lot of a capella versions. And so I just said, “what if you did that?” And that was it. I just planted that one little seed. And then he did a version, and he basically played it on piano, on the [Roland digital multitrack] VS880. He basically picked apart the piano chord and harmonized it, and came up with that big
4 part-or-more version. And we listened to it, and thought, “huh, that’s really cool, but it’s a bit too … liturgical.” And he went back and just did a different version. And we also did a different version where we took that and just added strings to it.

The earliest studio recording of “I Didn’t Understand” (then called “Watch the Worlds Collide”) has markedly different lyrics from the version that closes
XO:

Everybody’s looking for the next in line to love

Then ignore, put out, and put away

And I’d be happy just to be relieved from duty right away—

I know what’s gonna happen to me

When people talk about love,

They’re painting pictures of someone’s pretty side

But go look yourself in the face

And watch the worlds collide, watch the worlds collide

Waiting for a bus to take my thoughts away from us

And drop me off far away from you

’Cause my feelings never change a bit—I’m waiting to get over it

But I know what it is I have to do

When people talk about love

They’re painting pictures of someone’s pretty side

But I look myself in the face, and watch the worlds collide, watch the worlds collide

In a slightly later live version (performed on July 29, 1997), Smith’s lyrics have begun to resemble their final form, save for the song’s closing stanza:

So don’t talk to me about love

Or paint me pictures of my one pretty side

When you’ve seen us both in my face,

Watch the worlds collide, watch the worlds collide

The theme of intra-personal rupture and unification is one that Smith addresses in many songs, including “Cecilia/Amanda” and, perhaps most memorably,
post-Either/Or
single “Division Day.” Ultimately, though, these lyrical themes faded from “I Didn’t Understand” (though they are beautifully rendered on
XO,
as Smith’s unaccompanied, multitracked vocals finally join in unison at the song’s end). By November of 1997, Smith was performing the song with what would be the final revision of its closing words:

You once talked to me about love

And you painted pictures of a Neverneverland

And I could have gone to that place

But I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand

Smith finishes
XO
as he began it: with a picture. This time, the picture is not of the lyrically ubiquitous
“you and me,” but rather of the quite unexpected “Neverneverland.” In J. M. Barrie’s original
Peter Pan,
we are given a clue as to why this fictional place might be relevant to Smith:

I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.

Here, Barrie describes “Neverland”
not
just as a place where you never grow up, but rather as a place where
your imagination dictates reality; a world forged of the mind that is not “pitch-black” but rather enlivened by “astonishing splashes of color.” Furthermore, Barrie’s “Neverland” is not a simple utopia, nor is it a place of unbridled escapism. Like a child’s imagination, it is populated by both the mundane and the fantastical; the beautiful and the grotesque. It is an imaginary world haunted by reality.

Perhaps, then, Smith’s assertion that he “could have gone to that place” isn’t all that far-fetched. After all, Neverneverland is a place accessed not by knowledge, but by
belief.
It is “wonderful, lovely thoughts,” and the magical dust of a fairy, that grants you flight to Neverland. And, as Peter tells Wendy, a lack of belief not only closes off Neverland, it literally
kills
the magical beings who take you there: “Every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.” If we picture love as a Neverneverland, then perhaps it, too, is something that can only exist if we believe in it. Indeed, for all the sadness expressed on
XO,
there is just as strong a pull against it. “I’m not half what I wish I was.” “You’ve got a look in your eye when you’re saying goodbye, like you want to say hi.” Darkness is inescapable on
XO,
but it is not valued.

In an August 1998 interview with
Well Rounded Entertainment,
Smith repeated a line he gave in many
interviews to counter his image as a “sad sack”: “If there was one kind of song I wish I could write it would be more like ‘I Second That Emotion,’ by Smokey Robinson than like some really dark, depressing song.” In a strange way, Smith both addresses and enacts his wish with “I Didn’t Understand.” While the song is not triumphant—Smith
didn’t
go to that place—he
does
understand, now, that it is not impossible. Knowledge and certainty are eviscerated on
XO,
but Smith leaves us with a potent parting gift: belief.

Discussing which tracks were “relevant” to
XO
proves difficult given Smith’s way of working; songs would frequently be abandoned, recycled, and reapproached later. For the sake of casting a net that is not too wide, I am only discussing songs that were originally slated for inclusion on
XO,
and “Miss Misery,” a song that is inexorably tied to this period in Smith’s career.

In looking through a prolific artist’s rarities, songs like “Cecilia/Amanda” are true treasures; beautiful, illustrative songs never completed for release but somehow made more precious by their obscurity.

Though “Cecilia/Amanda” was originally slated for inclusion on
XO,
Schnapf suggests that Smith never
finished it to his own satisfaction:

I don’t think that song was really gonna come to be…. It was a really old song that had been kicking around forever…. It was something he was trying to rework, and it never quite got there. It’s an old song that I think he had written with a friend of his who’s now a doctor.

That friend is Garrick Duckler, who played with Smith in his high school band Stranger Than Fiction and later co-wrote a cassette’s worth of songs with Smith under the name A Murder of Crows. Only one of Duckler’s collaborations with Smith has been formally released—“Night Cap” from Heatmiser’s
Cop and Speeder
record—but Smith did occasionally use a snippet or idea from Duckler’s music, or in some cases put an entire set of Duckler’s lyrics to his own music.

Duckler was kind enough to offer some of his recollections of “Cecilia/Amanda”:

It was [originally] “Celia said to Amanda” not one name “Cecilia-Amanda,” [but] actually he did change it to “Cecilia/Amanda,” which is funny because I remember that Elliott was joking with me that Celia is not really a woman’s name but is the stuff in your lungs and then I told him that the song is really about microscopic parts of the lungs trying to sort out their
problems. We’d joke around a lot like this. He had a wonderful sense of humor.

“Cecilia/Amanda” is a favorite among Smith’s fans, and with good cause. Musically, it is one of the most elegant songs in Smith’s repertoire, released or unreleased. The only extant studio version of “Cecilia/Amanda” was recorded at Jackpot!, but a new recording was approached and subsequently abandoned during the
XO
sessions at Sunset Sound. According to Schnapf, the “b-list” string section hired to perform on
XO
(with the exception of ex-Mahavishnu Orchestra violinist Jerrod “Jerry” Goodman) struggled with the bent note that Smith performed on a synthesizer for the Jackpot! demo:

There were big scoring dates that day, all the really good players were scattered through all the big film studios. It ended up being ok, but there were certain things they could not do. They couldn’t swing at all.

The skill of the string players notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine a perfect organic realization of the synthesized string bend on the one extant studio recording of “Cecilia/Amanda.” Though the sound quality is less than stellar, the Jackpot! demo of “Cecilia/Amanda” presents a full arrangement much in the vein of “Waltz #2” or “baby Britain,” replete with piano, guitar, bass
(courtesy of Quasi’s Sam Coomes) and drums. Lyrically, “Cecilia/Amanda” can be read as a more philosophically adventurous counterpoint to “Baby Britain”—an incisive character sketch of a person who fails to live up to her potential. In “Cecilia/Amanda,” Smith’s interest in personal rupture is given a literal manifestation in the form of a mother and child.

Smith closes “Cecilia/Amanda” with a play at contrasts:

Amanda put on a new party dress yesterday

Dancing to a record you scratched

Some deal in amateur acting, making opposites match

This final line appears in earlier versions as “the two of you’s a study in making total opposites match.” The equation of “making opposites match” and “amateur acting” speaks to the clumsy impossibility of uniting opposites. In an earlier verse, Smith describes a strip club (where the mother works as a “pretty dancer”) as “a place where lonely men pay to make their opposites match,” casting an air of sleaze and desperation on the very (impossible) idea of reconciling opposites. Opposing ideas can coexist—and often do in Smith’s lyrics—but they can never match.

Though it is among his most philosophically provocative songs, I suspect that Smith never fine-tuned
the lyrics of “Cecilia/Amanda” to his satisfaction. The end of the song’s second verse was refined numerous times, but even the lyrics on the Jackpot! recording seem to fall short of Smith’s standards:

Every remembrance of you has been buried below

Every memory that I unhappily know

The themes are familiar, but the language (especially the parallel use of “remembrance” and “memory”) is unusually clunky. This seems to be the couplet in the song that Smith struggled with the most; in the earliest live version of the song, Smith sang “She ain’t got a father now ’cause he’s buried below / Way up high in the sky with all the people she knows.” Given Smith’s tendency to abandon and reapproach songs, there does exist a chance that “Cecilia/Amanda” might have been picked up and completed for another album. As it stands, “Cecilia/Amanda” is a poignant realization of Smith’s attitude toward potential, its very incompleteness testifying to the vastness of Smith’s talent.

“New Monkey” is one of a handful of Smith’s songs that explicitly utilizes the language of drug abuse to broach broader philosophical and emotional issues.
Smith begins the song by introducing a “sidewalk boss,” who sees Smith as a “picture of dissatisfaction that he can only see as a junkie.” Smith continues, “though I might be straight as an arrow, he’s busy shaking hands with my monkey.”