Elliott Smith

[ghost of miles]

Autumn de Wilde, who took a lot of pictures of ES over the years, has a new book coming out that will include photographs and conversations with ES's inner circle of friends and fellow musicians, many of whom have rarely or never gone on record about him. The book will also come with a CD of live acoustic performances.

Some other songs I've been digging off NEW MOON:

New Disaster

Almost Over

All Cleaned Out

[.:.impossible]

Ghost, you are the man. Thank you for keeping us in tune. It is good to see that Elliott was such an important part of so many people's lives.

[ghost of miles]

Autumn de Wilde's book finally came in today at the Book Corner (my fave B-town bookstore)...fantastic if you're an ES fan, a mix of pictures that she took around the time of FIGURE 8 (she did the cover) and interviews with people like Joanna Bolme, Sam Coomes, Jon Brion, and others who haven't really gone on the record much about ES before. The CD is great, too, five solo-acoustic songs from Largo in L.A. circa '98, including a cover of Hank Williams Jr.'s "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down." The book's definitely a bit worshipful, but not in a sticky-schmaltzy way... a lot of stories in there that I'd never heard or read before.

I was listening to a live May '03 show for awhile after reading the first half of the book... damn, he was trying so hard to get back to where he'd been, performance-wise, before 2001. The contrast between it and the book CD from '98 was pretty stark.

[ghost of miles]

I've raved elsewhere on this board about the 33 1/3 book series--there's now one out about Elliott's XO album:

Elliott Smith's XO

Pretty good--I think he ends up pushing back a bit too hard against certain aspects of ES's media image, although the critique itself is a worthy endeavor--and there's a lot of good background on how the songs for the album developed.

[ghost of miles]

Been revisiting Elliott's music the past couple of days (and even more has surfaced since this thread's most active years) and finding that it resonates with me as powerfully as ever.  This morning I watched an entire hour-long October 2000 set from the Figure 8 tour, about two weeks before I saw him at the Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky.  While the Southgate performance was fine (he hadn't gone off the rails yet.. that happened almost immediately after this tour ended), he seems more on for this show, and there are great electric full-band versions of several of his acoustic-based songs.  Video/audio quality is not necessarily great, but I actually often prefer "lo-fi" fan videos of shows as opposed to pro shots... they give me a more visceral, you-are-there vibe.  At the very end there's a nice clip of him signing a woman's guitar and tuning it for her before he boards his tour bus.  (The venue was Howlin' Wolf in New Orleans... ah, for the days of attending live music events.)