Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing Read Online Free PDF Page B

The subject of the song is a kid’s internal suffering and his tormented relationship to peers and family. The whole story, the whole plaint, is framed by a skeptical comment about the person relating it.
    The first words are “It’s a junkie dream, makes you so uptight/Yeah it’s Halloween, tonight and every night.” The portrayal of this character grows even more critical a couple lines later: “You’re a symphony, man, with one fucking note.” The song then goes on to tell the story of this single-note character, to describe his “junkie dream.” As it turns out, Halloween every night means a constant return to childhood, and that recurring vision is described in detail. In the chorus, the song slips into the perspective of the person having the “junkie dream”: “Help me kill my time/ ’cause I’ll never be fine.”
    This ambiguous figure—the troubled complainant deserving of both scolding and understanding—populates a good half of the songs Elliott Smith wrote. And ambiguity characterizes his attitude toward where he grew up and toward himself. He didn’t show much affection for Texas when he got older, but he knew he couldn’t leave it behind completely.
    In the Kill Rock Stars version of “Some Song,” Smith sings, “How they beat you up week after week/and when you grow up you’re going to be a freak.” The “they” could be most easily understood as other kids in school. But in live versions of that song—and there are at least two recorded instances of this—he sang, “Charlie beat you up week after week.” Of course, Smith took pains to explain that his songs shouldn’t be interpreted as diary entries, and “Some Song” shouldn’t be understood as a factual report. When Spin asked Smith if his stepfather “had a violent side,” he wouldn’t answer on the record. “He’s had a tough time in his life and has moved forward in a lot of ways. We didn’t get along when I was a kid,” Smith allowed, adding that he didn’twant to “dredge that all up” with Charlie, whom he never mentioned by name.
    Steven was already able to write songs in Texas. “He was always dabbling in something,” says Merritt, “even if it was just little instrumental numbers he would write up. The first time I remember witnessing him try to write a song was when he and I went to South Padre Island way down in south Texas on a family vacation, right next to the border with Mexico. We went there the summer before he left to go to Portland. It was a weird set of circumstances: My family was planning on going to South Padre Island for a week, and they said, ‘Hey, it’d be cool to bring Steve. Have a buddy, bring the guitars.’ We went down there and did the beach thing. We came back after that, and then a week later I went to the same place with his family, and once again we took the guitars and spent another week. And it was during the second vacation, with his family, when he said, ‘Hey, let’s write a song,’ and we tried it. He was really kind of getting into it. We were fishing around for chord schemes. We sat down with the full intent of writing a song. I remember him being real intent about it, really fascinated by the process of how to write a song, and by that time he had delved into a wide range of tastes, and during that time we were talking about lyrics such as Pink Floyd’s. That’s when he really started paying attention to lyrics: Were they writing about something that they knew, or were they writing some cheesy-ass love songs for kicks? He’d write some ideas down and scratch that out and say, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’ But he kept at it—and he was fourteen.
    “He definitely took the reins of the songwriting session. I was there to help discover chord structures and I was there to play what he told me to play. I remember being like, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, but he does.’”

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    When Smith moved to his father’s house the following