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Oct 22, 2024 Issue #69 - 20th Anniversary Issue By Matt Fink Photography by Wendy Lynch Redfern

(Note: This article originally appeared in our 20th Anniversary Issue and it has remained exclusive to our print magazine since then. It’s making its debut online in honor of the 20th anniversary of the release of From a Basement on the Hill. Under the Radar was the last magazine to interview Smith before his tragic passing and at the time of our interview he was working on From a Basement on the Hill. Included in this article are frames from our 2003 photo-shoot with Smith in his recording studio.)

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In the fall of 2004, Rob Schnapf and Joanna Bolme didn’t really want to talk to the press. Having combed through 45 hours of material to assemble the final Elliott Smith album, From a Basement on the Hill, they were the only logical choices to field the questions Smith was no longer around to answer. When Smith died in October of 2003, Schnapf noticed a trend in the press coverage surrounding his passing. Those who knew Smith best—former bandmates, friends, collaborators—weren’t the ones telling his story, and the one that was emerging was mythologizing him into a caricature, the joyless patron saint of self-destructive indie rockers. Bolme and Schnapf decided to talk, if only to remind everyone that Smith was a brilliant artist, too. “We wanted to control the narrative and keep it focused on the music and not the easy part of writing about ‘Oh, the sad suicidal troubadour, blah blah blah,’” Schnapf recalls, now 17 years later. “He wasn’t planning any of what happened. He was making a record, and this was the record he was making.”

Of course, after the album’s release in October of 2004, the sad, suicidal troubadour narrative is the one that stuck. A contemporary New York Times article—one of a handful that Schnapf and Bolme agreed to—was typical; Smith was Gen X’s Mr. Misery, the junkie poet and troubled genius whose last chapter was always destined to be tragic. (That article cranked up the melodrama a bit further, describing Bolme as running out of the interview in tears, when Schnapf says she was simply leaving to use the restroom.) The reviews were unambiguously positive, but even there the mythology was beginning to harden. From a Basement on the Hill was Smith’s musical suicide note, the skeleton key to unlock the last few tumultuous years of his life and explain why he would decide to bring it to an end. By the end of the press cycle, Smith’s actual music started to seem like a subplot in a larger human tragedy.

Nearly 20 years later, the distance between Smith’s life and his work is negligible, the two so intertwined that there’s no parsing them anymore. For better or worse, his story has taken on a life of its own. He is the subject of two biographies and one documentary film, with a third book devoted to the controversy surrounding his death. Was it a suicide? A murder? The official autopsy report left open the possibility of homicide, as Smith’s apparent self-inflected stab wounds to the heart didn’t fit the usual pattern of such cases. Now a generation after his passing, Smith has achieved a sort of ubiquity that eluded him during his life, with everyone from Phoebe Bridgers to Frank Ocean citing him as an influence. Free of the burden of having to be the album that was the culmination of Smith’s body of work, From a Basement on the Hill can now be seen for what it is—Smith’s loudest, rawest, most experimental release. But we’ll never know for sure what it would have sounded like had he survived to finish it.

Where Time Reverses

It’s hard to remember now, but when Smith began writing and recording the songs that would become From a Basement on the Hill in the spring of 2001, he was regarded as someone who was coming dangerously close to squandering his potential. Despite a now legendary performance at the 1998 Academy Awards for his Oscar-nominated “Miss Misery,” international rock stardom never quite materialized. Figure 8, his most recent full-length release at the time, had received somewhat mixed reviews and slipped into the Billboard 200 at a disappointing 99, perceived by some as a less-inspired version of 1998’s XO. At some point during the Figure 8 tour, he began to unravel.

Smith returned home to Los Angeles addicted to heroin, soon graduating to crack cocaine. Still harboring resentment over an intervention from years earlier, he distanced himself from longtime manager Margaret Mittleman, and, by extension, Schnapf, her husband. Frustrated with DreamWorks—his label for his previous two releases—and their unwillingness or inability to get Figure 8 on the radio, he decided he wanted out. After recording a handful of tracks with Jon Brion, the much-heralded producer who had played in Smith’s backing band for a few TV appearances, their relationship ended abruptly. Brion reportedly refused to work with Smith if his drug use continued, and Smith was not the kind of artist who dealt well with ultimatums. “Burning every bridge that I cross,” he would sing on one of From a Basement on the Hill’s more reflective ballads, “Let’s Get Lost,” “To find some beautiful place to get lost.” By May 2001, he was living like he meant it.

After a few phone calls with David McConnell, a Los Angeles musician and producer who traveled in the same social circles, Smith was ready to start over. And just like that, he was loading up his car with recording equipment, instruments, and reels of tape of half-finished songs. It was already 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, but Smith had been staying up for days at a time and was ready to work. His destination was McConnell’s home studio in Malibu, the house whose basement would eventually turn up in the album’s title. Smith had found his place to get lost, and, for the following few months at least, he knew exactly what he wanted.

“It was going to be a double album, 32 tracks, and he had this very complete vision,” McConnell recalls, explaining that he and Smith quickly bonded over their love of analog equipment and experimental recording techniques. He wanted to make something less impressionistic, Smith said, to play with form in a way he never had before. Where his previous two records had been tightly constructed and focused, this one would sprawl, getting weirder and weirder until it dissolved into noise. As soon as he walked through the door, Smith was ready with his first assignment, asking McConnell to do a mix of a complicated piano ballad with the working title “True Love is a Rose.” A few hours later, satisfied with McConnell’s work, Smith would jump right into “Shooting Star,” a stinging rebuke to a former lover that served as a jumping off point for the near two years of experimentation that would follow.

“There was a lot of energy in the air,” McConnell says. “But then Elliott, because he was using chemicals to help him, he would stay up sometimes for two or three days, and he’d want to work through the night. And I couldn’t because I’m not comfortable doing hard drugs, so I really struggled with sleep deprivation. So I would go nap for three or four hours while he was working by himself. And sometimes I was sleeping right in the control room on my bed in my bedroom, right next to him while he was recording. Then he’d wake me up a few hours later, like, ‘Alright, man. That’s enough sleep. Let’s get back to work!’ So he was very obsessive about the process.”

Having proven his mastery of the confessional pop form on his previous two albums, Smith was eager to blow up his earlier templates. Though he had recorded workable versions of a handful of tracks with Brion, he had no interest in using them now. If XO and Figure 8 had been expert exercises in meticulous pop classicism, he wanted something that was wild and unpredictable, ugly and unkempt where his former releases had been clean and comprehensible. He wasn’t only burning bridges with those closest to him; he appeared to be burning bridges to prior versions of himself.

“If his voice wasn’t on it, you almost wouldn’t know that it’s Elliott,” McConnell says of the music they were making. “He kept talking about going back to his roots, but he ended up just trying to create entirely new sounds. You could tell his songwriting was still very Elliott Smith, because it was so deep in its form and so complex. The writing was definitely progressing naturally, but it was the progression that he was looking to change at the time. He really liked the records he had done already. He knew that they were quality. He wasn’t dissing his former engineers or producers. He was saying, ‘I want something different now for this one. I really want to get out there with it a little bit and experiment.’ So that’s what we did.”

The tracks they created represent the gnarliest and most visceral of Smith’s career, with knotty tangles of detuned guitars and thundering drums providing a perfect counterpoint to the haunted, aching ballads that were his stock in trade. Opener “Coast to Coast” hits as hard as anything in his catalog, rising like a monster out of a sea of noise, with churning drums and swirling guitar lines licking around the edges of Smith’s vocal. A master of metaphor, Smith never wrote more directly about addiction than on “Strung Out Again” and “King’s Crossing”—two tracks that ride a dark pulse of queasy guitars to add a sense of menace to Smith’s soft vocals. He directly addresses the topic of death several times, even declaring his readiness for it at one point, but the album is more existential than funereal. Instead of a rumination on his coming demise, it’s a statement of frustration about what he has become—namely the sad, suicidal troubadour whose grief is his brand. Underlying it all is a subtle recognition that by making another album about despair and self-doubt, Smith was only reinforcing the narrative he was kicking against.

From day one, McConnell says he knew that working with Smith was going to represent a different sort of challenge. This was the period when the chaos of Smith’s private life began to spill out into the open. At an August 2001 performance at the Los Angeles Sunset Junction Street Fair, he appeared gaunt and frail, fumbling through his set before apologizing for being too “fucked up” to play. He became paranoid, believing that DreamWorks was sending spies to follow him around Los Angeles in unmarked white vans, their agents breaking into his apartment to steal music from his computers. Though he talked often about suicide, McConnell says, Smith had decided he would rather slowly ruin his health through substance abuse than deliberately take his own life. He didn’t want to die—at least not all of the time—but was willing to take the chance.

“He said, ‘Look, I do a lot of drugs. And I’m going to do them in front of you, and I don’t want you to criticize me for it,’” McConnell recalls. “And it was like, ‘Shit…okay.’ And so that was one of the first things that I knew I was dealing with. He didn’t want to be criticized for his poor choices, and I believe that’s probably best when somebody is struggling. So I didn’t. Instead I just tried to be supportive and be a friend and keep him safe. When he would do so many drugs where I got scared that he might have OD’d or that he might do something stupid, I tried to watch him and make sure he was safe. I was always ready to call for help if need be, and I tried to encourage him to stay focused on the recording process and eat. He didn’t like to sleep. Sometimes I would take him out to lunch, because I had to eat. I’d be like, ‘If you want to talk about the record, you’ve got to go to lunch with me.’”

McConnell looks back on the period fondly, recalling long conversations about songwriting and late-night recording sessions that dissolved into giddy fits of laughter as the two took turns telling jokes. Smith was a harsh critic of his own work, but he seemed genuinely content with the tracks they were making, McConnell says. The two of them would spend afternoons driving around LA, blasting the mixes they were making out of Smith’s car speakers. They became friends, so much that Smith presented McConnell with the acoustic Gibson guitar that he played on the Academy Awards as a gesture of gratitude. (McConnell returned the guitar to Smith’s family after his passing.) From a Basement on the Hill didn’t end up being the album they talked about making, but McConnell is quick to point out that Smith was an incurable perfectionist who frequently revised his ideas, making it just about impossible to know what the final album would have sounded like had he survived.

Flush with major label cash, Smith was spending an obscene amount of money on illicit substances, so much so that McConnell encouraged him to redirect his spending toward building a studio just so he’d have something tangible left. That kicked off a new addiction, and Smith began spending so much time researching and repairing the gear he was buying on eBay for his eventual New Monkey Studio that he began to lose focus on making music.

Eventually, Smith went to rehab and McConnell heard less and less from him during the last year of his life, one that by most accounts was relatively happy and stable. It was at New Monkey Studio that Under the Radar conducted the last interview of Smith’s life, finding him clean and sober and excited to explain why his new tracks represented a kind of creative rebirth. Given the fragile state of Smith’s newfound sobriety, McConnell believes that Smith’s new girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, was pruning away anyone who had been associated with him during the turmoil of the preceding years. Smith wasn’t burning bridges anymore, but most paths to him seemed to be closed for repairs.

“I think he really had a lot to prove to himself and also to the people around him,” McConnell says. “He really did care what people thought about him, despite what I’ve heard people say. And he was definitely a very sensitive person, like a lot of creative people are. People will tell you a lot of musicians are doing it because they want to find that love. They want to find their place. They want to find meaning in the world, but they also want to be appreciated. Unfortunately, when he died, a lot of his wishes died with him. The record still turned out great, don’t get me wrong. But there was some stuff that was really magic that didn’t make it onto the album—just amazing, like some of his best music ever. So I’m kind of bummed that we never got to finish the project and deliver it to the labels.”

A Setting Sun

Rob Schnapf doesn’t recall the exact reasons that the Smith family approached him and Smith’s former girlfriend and confidant Joanna Bolme about completing From a Basement on the Hill, but he remembers feeling a responsibility—almost paternalistic in nature—to help his friend one last time. Having produced Smith’s work stretching back to his days in Heatmiser—the next-big-thing post-punk act that dissolved when Smith’s solo career began to take off—Schanpf doubtlessly logged more studio hours with him than anyone else during his creative life. Though he hadn’t been involved with any part of the recording process, Schnapf says that Smith had been reaching out to him in the months before his death. With a reported 50 tracks at some level of completion, it was clear that Smith left behind a mess.

“We had the list of what he wanted, and that’s pretty much the record,” Schnapf says. “Then there was a lot of stuff that we just couldn’t find. ‘King’s Crossing,’ for example. That song I went to mix, and it was on two-inch tape, and it consisted of a stereo mix on the two-inch and a vocal. And it was impossible; I couldn’t mix it. They just didn’t go together. And it ended up being this forensic thing, because he had been recording on every single format. There were all kinds of digital formats; it wasn’t just ProTools. It was all of them,” he laughs. “So there was some stuff we couldn’t find or there was stuff that he never got to do the vocal yet. I just remember this one song. And it’s a beautiful piece of music, and you know exactly what he was going to do, but he just never got to do it.”

The tracks seemed to span the length of Smith’s career, and Schnapf was convinced that he’d heard Elliott play early versions of some of them during their previous work together. Two songs from Smith’s list were left off. The family pulled back “Abused,” a solemn ballad that erupts into a power-pop anthem. Knowing that its title alone would make it ripe for misinterpretation, Schnapf decided against including “Suicide Machine,” a track that would have been one of the more upbeat tracks on the album had it been included. Hoping that working on the unreleased work would provide a kind of catharsis, Schnapf soon found himself so lost in the work of editing and mixing that it was easy to forget Smith would never hear the final product. But Elliott was never far away, his presence reasserting itself in every chair creak and drag on a cigarette that surrounded the music on the tapes. Until the album was finished, at least, Elliott Smith was still alive.

“I remember getting it all done, flying to New York to Sterling Sound, getting it mastered, and going out that night to meet GGGarth,” Schnapf says, mentioning Garth “GGGarth” Richardson, the producer known for his work with Rage Against the Machine and metal acts. “He’s an awesome guy. We went out for drinks afterwards that night, and he said, ‘How did it go?’ And I was just like, ‘Bwah…’ Something happened and I just cried on his shoulder,” Schnapf with a tone of disbelief. “That’s not something I do.”

After the album was completed, Schnapf couldn’t listen to it or anything else he’d done with Smith. Expecting From a Basement on the Hill to have its detractors, he was nonetheless frustrated by listeners who griped about the song selection or mixing choices. The reviews were fantastic, but Smith’s death had made every lyric carry a different weight, with armchair psychologists eager to solve the mystery of Smith’s death by piecing together the larger narrative of the album. The album that Schnapf and Bolme had hoped would be a celebration of Smith’s life had been rendered just another piece of evidence to figure out why he was gone. “A lot of that stuff—overdose, suicide—it’s just one flash of a mistake,” Schnapf says. “And that ends up marking the memory forever. And it just casts this huge shadow over your entire life, but, really, it’s this one decision. There aren’t clues. There isn’t meaning. This wasn’t planned. Who knows what the fuck happened there? I don’t know. And nobody is going to figure it out, either.”

As the more salacious aspects of Smith’s life began to crowd out the discussion of his actual music, Schnapf had an uneasy realization. If a multifaceted individual such as Smith could be reduced to a caricature within days of his death, how many times had history reduced a person’s life—let alone a far more complicated historical event—into something that barely represented the larger truth? How could you trust anything you read in the media after seeing the process unfold in real time? By the end of 2004, Schnapf was exhausted. His friend was gone, and finishing his final work had failed to bring any closure. He put From a Basement on the Hill out of his mind, filed it away as representative of something he just didn’t want to think about anymore.

“What’s weird is that I listened to it last night for the first time since then, and I didn’t have any of those feelings when I heard the record,” Schnapf says. “I was like, ‘Ah, this is a really cool record.’ I never listened to it, just because of all of those feelings that happened to me, and I didn’t really want to go there again. And I didn’t get any of that. I just felt all of the music, and I just really enjoyed it. That was really nice.”

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