XO, Elliott Smith

He passed away 21 years ago today

Several readers of Log Off have told me that the book made them want to listen to Elliott Smith after, or that one of their favorite scenes is the “Elliott Smith car ride.” This makes me happy to hear, because it’s one of the scenes in the novel I’m most proud of, and it’s also a scene I’ve wanted to write for a long time. Not that scene in particular, but one that featured his music. I have a paper trail of journals and zines from my teenage years, where I wrote very teenager-y things like, “Elliott Smith sometimes influences my writing more than anyone else. There are so many lyrics I love that embody what I want to be the feelings of my characters.”  

I don’t want to say too much about the scene in Log Off because the reason I’m proud of it is that it does a lot without saying too much, or without the characters saying much. But for some context, toward the end of the novel, after an emotionally heavy moment, Ellora, the seventeen-year-old protagonist, and Brian, her mother’s ex-boyfriend who has been raising her since her mother abandoned her, listen to Elliott Smith’s XO on a car ride back home. Ellora has never heard his music before and her first stunned words are, “His voice.”

She is reacting to hearing the opening track “Sweet Adeline” but the song that I imagine both characters liking the most, as well as relating to, is the second song on the album, “Waltz #2 (XO).” It’s my favorite of his songs too and largely regarded as one of his best. On the subreddit r/elliottsmith, when asked to rank songs from 1-10, the responses for “Waltz #2 (XO)” are overwhelmingly 10s, alongside comments like “the definitive Elliott Smith song” and “one of the greatest songs of all time.”

In “Waltz #2 (XO),” Elliott Smith flashes back to a time in his Texas childhood when he watched his mother and stepfather perform some passive-aggressive karaoke, and from there, you get an abstract portrait of his troubled relationship with both of them. Specific details are scarce, the picture forms from the anguished way he sings lines like “just leave me alone” and “XO, Mom” and of course, the chorus, which is also directed toward his mother. Like many flashbacks, he seems to be narrating from both within the childhood memory and from the present, reflecting back on it (“I'm so glad that my memory's remote”). And of course, the bridge is sung from the present. The bridge is one of my favorites of all time, and it’s more heartbreaking to listen to now, knowing his end. 

When I was a kid, I used to wonder what would happen to my musical heroes when I was older. Fiona Apple and Thom Yorke had mercurial personalities, or at least that was how the media portrayed them. I worried about Fiona when she said, “I know I'm going to die young” in Spin and I imagined Radiohead would have a similar trajectory as The Beatles, breaking up in a few years. But today, both Thom Yorke and Fiona Apple have seemingly adjusted better to fame and are still actively making music. Nearly all the artists listed in Log Off are still working, or are eyeing some kind of reunion tour, hoping to cash in on the current moment of both millennial nostalgia and disposable income. Only Elliott Smith is frozen in time for me, and in my teenage years. I’m older now than when he died, so it’s meaningful to bring him with me to a book published in 2024, and have his music be part of an important scene in it. And a scene that isn’t depressing either. So often his music is described as depressing, or his name is evoked as an artist someone must be listening to because they’re depressed, and I’ve always felt that was reductive. There’s so much more going on, including beauty, anger, and hope. That plurality is what made his songs so good.

Of course, that scene takes place in the summer of 2001, when he is still alive. Soon, this person whose music brought these two characters such solace during a hard time in their lives will be gone, which I think is how a lot of people felt when he passed away on October 21, 2003.

As I’ve mentioned in interviews about Log Off, unlike Ellora, I rarely wrote direct prose on LiveJournal, I mostly posted graphics and digital collages, but when Elliott Smith died I wrote something the day after. Everyone on LiveJournal was writing about him, as he was someone all my friends in the LiveJournal community loved. It’s the first time I remember seeing something like this happen, a collective online mourning when a beloved artist passes away, though I’ve seen it happen on many platforms since, for other public figures gone too soon. But he’s still the only one I’ve ever written something like that for:

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2003 | 7:13pm

I could never make a graphic about how I feel about Elliott Smith's suicide, it would cheapen it. I don't think any famous person's death has ever had such an effect on me before. He had one of the most lovely voices and wrote absolutely the most beautiful, often bitter songs. I remember first being stunned at his incredible cover of The Beatles “Because” at the end of American Beauty. He became one of my favorites. And when it came to lyrics, there was no one, not Radiohead, not any other band or songwriter, whose lyrics I identified with like Elliott Smith's, especially on a bad day. They were so personal and so lonely. The only thing that makes me glad is to see all the love for him on my friends page. I think you all understand how his music was always there to comfort you at your lowest. If only there had been someone like that for him.

I will miss you Elliott Smith, XO

“I'm never gonna know you now

but I'm gonna love you anyhow”

Elliott, more than twenty years later, I still miss you.