“It’s a double-edged sword of wanting to do what’s being asked of you and really hating what’s being asked of you and not being good at it, in that he’s real, he’s not a bulls*** artist.” In the wake of the Oscars, Smith signed with DreamWorks Records, but Schnapf feels the press and radio “game” that ensued played further on Smith’s insecurities. “I walked out and Jack Nicholson was sitting about six feet away … At a certain point, I threw myself into it because all of my friends were like, ‘One of us is on the moon!’” “It was surreal enough that it didn’t seem like it happened to me,” he said in 2003. When he was nominated for an Oscar afterwards, Smith was cajoled into performing at the 1998 ceremony with threats that the organisers would get Richard Marx to sing the song if he refused.
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In 1997, filmmaker and fan Gus Van Sant used Smith’s song “Miss Misery” in Good Will Hunting and the spotlight turned on this glare-shy genius.
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It would soon become apparent that public adoration was no solution. I would tell him, ‘People love you,’ and, ‘They love your music.’” “Lots of people have stories of … staying up with Elliott ’till five in the morning, holding his hand, telling him not to kill himself.” One was Cavity Search Records chief Christopher Cooper, who told Spin, “He would tell me that if I didn’t see him again, to tell everyone … in our community, that it’s not their fault, not to take it personally. “In Portland we got the brunt of Elliott’s initial depression,” musician and friend Pete Krebs told one paper. It was a story many of his old Portland friends would have found familiar. He just talked about it as if it were going to happen.” His New York roommate Dorien Garry told Spin: “He always talked about suicide… He made me promise that I wouldn’t be mad at him. Smith soon left Portland for Brooklyn, characteristically low. They think that you drink too much … I just don’t think being scared is a good enough reason to take over somebody’s life.” He reiterated the point to NME: “More of the songs have a vibe of ‘Get the f*** off me, and quit telling me what I should be doing’.” Walking out after a few days, Smith would use his simmering anger over the experience in new songs, which he told Spin were about “how quickly people will invade your space just because you don’t deal with things like they do. Tender and tremulous, it channelled Nick Drake, Red House Painters and Big Star, while speaking to Smith’s studio naivety and deepest insecurities. In tandem with the third Heatmiser record (now signed to Virgin), they and co-producer Tom Rothrock helped Smith create a surreptitious masterpiece in 1997’s Either/Or. One night, Schnapf and his partner Margaret Mittleman saw Smith play “Needle in the Hay”, from his self-titled 1995 second album, and soon became his producer and manager, respectively. Word spread of his bewitching performances, the antithesis of grunge but the inheritor of its spirit. Alongside Heatmiser albums, Smith quietly snuck out his first solo collection of minimalist four-track acoustic demos recorded on a borrowed guitar in his basement (1994’s Roman Candle), which, he said, “immediately eclipsed my band, unfortunately”. At college in Amherst, Smith started a noise-grunge band called Heatmiser, but he also took to playing solo acoustic shows when he returned to Portland. On graduation, he officially took the name Elliott. Smith started writing his own songs on piano and guitar from a young age – his father recalled a church talent show at which his son was beaten by someone tap-dancing to “Yankee Doodle Dandy” – and sang in several high school bands, sometimes under the pseudonym Elliott Stillwater-Rotter. “I was very worried about my mother.” In another interview, he elaborated: “I couldn’t stay in the same house as my stepfather.”
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“I didn’t sleep at all for about the first six months I lived there,” he told Under the Radar. His memories of his childhood had always been hazy, but at 14 he left his mother’s home in Texas to live with his father in Portland. His mother married an insurance salesman named Charlie Welch, whom Smith would claim first beat him on their wedding day, aged three. Born Steven Smith into a family from the Community Of Christ church, a Mormon denomination, he was only six months old when his parents split. Real, perhaps, because it was so deeply rooted.