I was flicking through Discogs, as you do, checking out the current resale values of some of the records in my collection. Not cos I’m selling them. I just wanted to feel good about having records that currently sit for sale at silly, over-inflated prices.
Husker Du’s Flip Your Wig at almost £40? Man! A first press Surfer Rosa now nudging £50?! Oh my golly, as the song goes. Live At The Witch Trials? That’s £60 all day long. It makes the £5 I paid for it all the more jammy. That first press of Definitely Maybe that Alan McGee later signed for me? That’ll be £250, thank you very much. Go figure. What a mad, record-buying world we currently live in.
The reissue of Elliott Smith‘s Either/Or album is a near £70 record these days. Released in 2017 for the album’s twentieth anniversary, it came beautifully packaged with extensive sleeve-notes, a Japanese-style obi strip (who doesn’t love an obi strip?) and a second LP of era-specific live cuts, demos and unreleased stuff. Normally the unreleased stuff on these sort of reissues was originally unreleased for very good reasons, but Elliott Smith could seemingly throw out incredible song after incredible song on a daily basis, far quicker than he could properly record them and commit them to release. His vault, as it has become clear, lies stuffed with stone cold, major to minor tearjerkers, coated in Beatles melodies and wistful melancholy, the likes of which I can’t seem to get enough of.
The Either/Or reissue contains two such beauties. I Don’t Think I’m Ever Gonna Figure It Out skiffs along on a Dylanish finger-picking pattern, a hundred miles an hour blur of first, second and third fingers coaxing a folky melody from the six strings below them, Elliott sounding (as always) like he’s playing two guitars at once, his voice close-miked and whispered then double tracked on the titular refrain. It’s lo-fi, campfire indie and all the more magic for it. You should seek it out.
The real treasure is what follows.
I Figured You Out arrives on a snippet of studio chatter before a mournful harmonium accompanies Elliott’s acoustic guitar, scratching out a very Elliott chord progression as a rhythm section falls in and an electric guitar picks out the melodic hooks. Elliott’s gossamer-light voice sounds sad and resigned, delicate and fragile throughout…but utterly incredible. His tone, his control, his ability to make you tear up when he harmonises with himself…he’s terrific. I’ve always been a sucker for a recorded vocal where you can hear the singer draw breath. I Figured You Out is full of that. There’s a wee bridge when he cheers up a bit, goes a bit pop, even, with some subtle whammy bar action, before he falls back into the main song again.
Elliott was a singer who didn’t need to look far to find his demons or subject matter and on I Figured You Out, he seems to be lamenting success-hungry fame hounds.
You’re every kind of collar
There ain’t nothing that you won’t claim
Your ambition and promise
And your addiction to fame
A ‘stupid pop song that I wrote in about a minute‘ (oh man!) Elliott oft compared I Figured You Out to something The Eagles might have recorded – the ultimate self-inflicted insult – and so gave it to his friend Mary Lou Lord to record and release instead. Elliott’s version though remains the definitive version, whether he lived to realise that or not. I could listen to it all day long.
Plain Or Pan 