Music in My Head- #1

I didn't know who Elliot Smith was when he was alive. I never heard him until someone burned me a copy of the Royal Tenenbaums Soundtrack, and there was "Needle in the Hay." By then he was already dead.

St. Ides? Do they even make that shit anymore? And if they did, what kind of white boy would drink that poison and also sing about it on an acoustic guitar? But that's part of the excitement here: the improbable mix of folk sensibilities with Bukowskian darkness and hip hop bravado.

If you listen to this live recorded version of "St. Ides Heaven," you can hear how thin Elliot Smith's voice was, how weak. Based on this, Smith's use of multiple layering of his voice for his studio albums makes sense. For a minute, I was disappointed that his voice was so small, and off tune. But then beauty of it hit me: even the ugliest, screeching little malcontent can sound like an angel if given enough time and attention, which Smith gets in the album version of this song:

The moon is a light bulb breaking
It'll go around with anyone
But it won't come down for anyone

The first line of this stanza is brilliant, and the way he sings it lets it resonate for you. The second and third lines though, those are the killers: the fact that he gets away with the word repetition just by being intentional and profound.

This music tells me that it is okay to be insolent and malformed in this world, that a constant smile is more horrific than the worst frown. That life is finite and it is better to live openly disdainful of its limitation that to cow before the inevitable.