Elliott Smith
Figure 8

THE REVIEW

Ever since I got to know it, I've had a strange relationship with Elliott Smith's music.

For a period of time, I find myself listening to it intensely.

Then, for almost a year, I completely forget about it to listen to something entirely different.

Finally, one fine day I fall back into it again, and the room of my solitary music fills with an atmosphere I can't define.

As if all the melancholy of the world comes to visit me when certain songs of his, in particular, knock on my door.

Seeing him live on YouTube, then, something I usually do once I start listening to him again, is not an easy experience… It strikes me the way he presents himself to the public, shy, as if he were arriving at a party to which he wasn't invited, but then his hands on the guitar begin to fly, the uncertain voice, like an evening breeze that has just risen, does the rest..

I chose one of his albums.. which is actually the only one I have in original, in my opinion his best, because it contains the song of his that I love the most.

And it's also the one most imbued, a rare thing in his music, with hope and serenity, before seeing them turn their backs on him forever.

This sort of review-letter (which in the end is neither one nor the other) came out of me, addressed to him, in scattered "verses"..

Singer "treehouse," how are you up there?

Do you still play those songs of yours?

Those songs like they were composed on the phone after the receiver was hung up on the other end?

Do the strings of your guitar still caress the autumn leaves as you once did?

Singer of melodious '60s/'70s nostalgia, with the Beatles in your heart.

Every now and then, just by chance, I come to listen to you, a shining tear of a distracted America of the early millennium.

Take me up there, even when, the bells in celebration, you feel like smiling and dancing for once, the others will forgive you.

I don't often remember you, but perhaps the secret lies all here.

Drugs and alcohol your witnesses to a difficult life to bear.

Your words in the sunlight and those, in solitude, whispered to a moon eventually sent to sleep with a knife planted in its chest.

Your last message on voicemail, your farewell, without words, which left others, for once, hanging on the other end.

Never having really managed to understand that they had spoken, in the background your magnificent music, with an unforgettable, solitary, deeply human heart in exile on the wrong side of love.