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[Music: Elliott Smith “2:45 AM”]
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Elliott Smith: Oh, definitely. Yeah, there's
a bunch of Elvis Costello records that like...
-
when I was in high school, just made all the
difference
-
between feeling like a total freak and feeling
like ... only a freak.
-
[laughter]
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A freak among other freaks.
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[Music:Elliott Smith: "2:45 AM"]
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>> Barney Hoskyns: Tell me how your very distinctive,
soft vocal style kind of emerged.
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>> Elliott Smith: I didn't like how I sounded
singing in my band,
-
but it was hard to sing like how I wanted
to because
-
playing live I had to just be at the
top of my lungs all the time,
-
and it made me sound like I had a really bad
cold or something.
-
It sounds really hoarse and kind of macho and weird.
[laughs]
-
I mean I've been doing four-track songs by
myself since I was like a teenager,
-
where I'd sing in a way that I ... I just
didn't think other people would like it,
-
so I didn't play it for them but eventually
I got over that, which I'm happy that I did,
-
because it's kind of a drag to be playing
a kind of music
-
that you don't really like as much as another
kind.
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>> [Music]
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>> Barney Hoskyns: Obviously some people have
given you some sort of folk music tag
-
and it just seems to me to be pretty off the
mark.
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>> Elliott Smith: Yeah, that really bothered me right at first,
-
when I first started playing, people would
be like, “Paul Simon.”
-
I'd be like, “I don't feel like I'm anything
like Paul Simon.”
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>> Barney Hoskyns: And in some ways…
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>> Elliott Smith: Thank you. Oh, iced tea.
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>> Waitress: Do you want me to get you Cokes? They didn't have any.
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>> Elliott Smith: No, that's fine, iced tea
is great, thank you.
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>> Barney Hoskyns: How much of your writing about, let's not call them addicts,
-
let's call them dependents.
-
How much of that is based on subjective experience
-
and how much is just based on being an observer?
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>> Elliott Smith: I'm definitely in them, but on the other hand
-
it's not like a diary or anything.
-
But, yeah, it's good to call them dependents,
-
because that was the point, as opposed to them being songs strictly about drugs or…
-
There's lots of ways people can be dependent on another person, or drugs, or...
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>> [Music: Elliott Smith “BETWEEN THE BARS”]
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>> Elliott Smith: I think everybody has that...
Those two irreconcilable ...
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>> Barney Hoskyns: Impulses.
>> Elliott Smith: Constant…
-
Doing battle with themselves that way, every day, all the time and sometimes it sucks,
-
but other times it results in people making
sort of a dream comprehensible to someone else
-
People are so… seem so chaotic internally,
but being filtered through some form
-
like making a record, sort of filters it down into something that can be understood.
-
It's hard to represent chaos, or like an absence of something.
-
It's much easier to represent the presence of something or a situation.
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People can be chaos but it's hard to fit it
-
into some creative piece that you made.
It's hard.
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>> [Music: Elliott Smith “Either/Or”]
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>> Barney Hoskyns: Listening to Either/Or,
I was kind of struck by how well it does manage
-
to juggle sweetness and pain. Is it too easy to say
-
these songs are kind of melancholy,
there's a lot of sorrowful quality to Elliott Smith's music?
-
>> Elliott Smith: Yeah, they don't make me sad or feel sorrowful to me,
-
but on the other hand I’m not… a lot of people are kind of depressed.
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I'm happy some of the time, and some of the time I'm not.
-
But like when I see a movie, for example, that I really like, that moves me or whatever
-
it’s usually happy and sad at the same time.
-
But, yeah, certain songs just feel a way that's hard
to put into words
-
and it's not happy and it's also not really
sad but I couldn't say what it is.
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>> [Music]
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>> Barney Hoskyns: You lived in these very
different parts of America.
-
Dallas, Portland, Brooklyn, is a kind of interesting
triangle, there.
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>> Elliott Smith: Yeah, actually, I've been thinking about moving somewhere, out of the US, maybe,
-
just to get out of here.
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>> Barney Hoskyns: Whereabouts are you thinking of going?
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>> Elliott Smith: I don't know, I have no idea.
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Somewhere where people aren't so mad would be nice
-
but I don't know if there is anywhere
like that.
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Who knows?
