Pain and Perspective

Aside from one shining moment of Oscar glory, Elliott Smith’s career was mostly of note only to critics and fans who bothered to look past the corporate mess of the record charts. His music was generally full of darkness and melancholy, but rarely did it descend into despair. “He wasn’t a maverick in the Kurt Cobain sense. Or a satyr consumed by passion, like the late Jeff Buckley… He sang about rejection with a wistful air, and could sound as if he were enduring an ordeal and romanticizing its aftershocks at the same time.”