The Top 50 Albums of the 2000s: #1

1 | ELLIOTT SMITH From A Basement on the Hill
Anti-, 2004

DOWNLOAD | “King’s Crossing”

Elliott Smith only ever made me uncomfortable once. It was in 1998, and we were sitting in a small group over coffee at the Pink Pony on Ludlow Street. In the way that coffee-shop conversations inevitably do, this one evolved into a roundtable dynamic: we began trading childhood war stories. Where are you from? was the first question. What was that like? was the next.

“I grew up in Texas,” Elliott answered.

And what was that like?

His expression turned blank, his body tense. “I don’t wanna talk about that today.”

From A Basement on the Hill was released almost exactly one year after Elliott Smith was found dead in his Los Angeles home, having allegedly stabbed himself in the chest on October 21, 2003. Courtney Love callously called it “the best suicide I ever heard of,” which was probably the most banal thing Kurt Cobain’s widow could have said, while most of the music blogs of the era played some version of the we-saw-it-coming card — an indicator that, on some level, many believed that Elliott was a hopeless depressive, a junkie, an inexorable tragedy. People wanted to believe that he had been living out his metaphors all along.

We all experience that disconnect at one point or another — the scuffle between the person we are and the person people believe we are — and the majority of that conflict gets played out through a third component: the person we project into the world. That third person is the most complex and also the least authentic; it is neither the true self nor the perceived self, but a calculated and reactionary self. For his part, Elliott was conscious of this trichotomy, and he spent the better part of his career trying to integrate these pieces into one cohesive whole: His songs were dark, but his personal demeanor was relatively upbeat — and he often used the media to split the difference. “I’m just as happy as all the other people I know,” he told me in an interview for Alternative Press in 1998. And over the next couple of years, as we became regular acquaintances in New York City, it occurred to me that he was right. Everyone I knew in the city back then was eating ramen and losing faith while Elliott was singing lines like, “I’m doing just fine hour to hour, note to note.” He was writing these lyrics inside of a bar — in the middle of the day — but still.

The last time I saw Elliott Smith, at the Metro in Chicago in 2000, he seemed as happy as all the other people I knew.

We never talked about it, but that day at the Pink Pony, when Elliott shut down, I recognized that wounded look. He made vague references to his childhood all the time, and in the only interview I ever did with him, he made it clear that this was something he didn’t find relevant to discuss. “I don’t want to draw people in with my sad story of this or that,” he said. “It doesn’t make it a better or worse song if someone had a really bad time growing up.” This is, of course, true. But in Elliott’s case, it wasn’t the “sad story” itself that had become germane to his work, but the coded expression of unresolved heartache. The projected person and the authentic self were colliding, perhaps inevitably. This happened to me, too.

On November 1, 2003, about a week after Elliott died, I crossed the street. I woke up three days later — just in time, they said, to avoid an emergency surgical procedure in which a hole would have been drilled into my skull. This is what we talk about when we talk about traumatic brain injuries.

Most people don’t live to talk about what it feels like to get hit by a tow truck, and those of us who do are not likely to remember much. There are so many immediate concerns to deal with when you regain consciousness — a six-month headache, multiple rib fractures, a broken pelvis that makes your right leg feel as if it were disconnected from the rest of your body — that the actual event becomes insignificant; it is, for many of us, the first time we realize that our entire lives could be spent trying to repair the outcome of past events. Having the next two months confined to a hospital bed, I had a lot of time to think about what I’d spent the first thirty years of my life trying to fix. All roads led back to my childhood.

And what was that like?

Up until the point where my mother finally decided to stop speaking to me altogether rather than confront her violent past, I usually wouldn’t bring this up over coffee, either.

DOWNLOAD | “Abused” (Demo)

I left San Francisco in the summer of 2004, six months after being discharged from the hospital. I had decided to move back to New York City, to fold my record label, to quit playing music, and to start over completely. At the heart of this resolve was a somewhat simple truism: If you want something you’ve never had, you need to do something you’ve never done. Some people figure this out on their own, but some of us need a tow truck to help push us along.

A review copy of From A Basement on the Hill was delivered to me on the morning I set out for my cross-country move. My friend Trevor and I listened silently as we pulled out onto the highway. “Coast to Coast” felt like an appropriate song to begin this trip, but the longer I listened, the more I realized that this song was not so much the suggestion of a departure, but the announcement of an arrival — the “last stop for a resolution.” It was neither pretty nor ugly, neither harsh nor tender; its flaws were not only to be exposed but celebrated. The projected self was merging with the authentic self in a way that Elliott had never before chosen to display. But if it grew difficult to listen to, it was only because we knew the end of this story.

It might seem bizarre that I’d choose this as my album of the decade — an album in which the original artist never approved the final mixes or tracklisting or artwork. But I’d argue that these circumstances only sustain the idea that Elliott’s vision for this album was so strong that it was almost impossible to fuck up. Indeed, the only blemish on its execution is not on what became the final product, but what had been dubiously omitted: Three songs were removed from the final version of From a Basement on the Hill at the behest of Elliott’s family. Among them was a song called “Abused,” in which Elliott finally gave a name to that thing he didn’t want to talk about. It demanded that he abandon all metaphor and just say it. We are only as sick as our secrets.

We didn’t know that at the time he was addicted to heroin and crack, smoking up to $1,500 worth a day. We didn’t know that he had actually tried to OD but failed, on more than one occasion. We didn’t know that he believed he was sexually abused by his stepfather as a child. We didn’t know that three months later, he’d check himself into rehab, get clean, and finally face the pain he’d spent years trying to numb. We didn’t know any of this.

This is the album of the decade because the gloves — and the masks — all finally came off.