Elliott Smith - An Introduction to… (Kill Rock Stars)

Other than a brief fame flirtation (singing “Miss Misery” on the Oscars), Smith spent his career a cult sensation. So seven years after his predictably tragic death, this collection is clearly not aimed at an adoring audience that knows these songs like it knows its ABCs, times tables, and keyboard emoticons. Thus, the questions for the uninitiated become: Is this a pithy introduction? And what was the big deal? Answers: it’s merely a serviceable, rather than intelligently chosen set. For starters, it makes zero sense to include only one song from the last two of his five LPs in his lifetime, 1998’s XO and 2000’s Figure 8. Ergo, these mere 14 selections (51 minutes) fail to underscore his transition from insular bedroom genius to fully-produced pop-folk wunderkind. Yet Introduction does lay out in stark terms what we lost at knifepoint in an L.A. bathroom, October 21, 2003. The guy was so real he still hurts. Battles with depression, drugs, and pain were his life, and his breathy, quietly disturbing, teeth-baring voice bore all his wounded distress, cracking the surface at every turn—see the incredible openers, “Ballad of Big Nothing, “Waltz #2” and “Pictures of Me,” and quieter turns thereafter, such as the typically desolate, emotionally-wracking “Twilight.” And apart from being so profoundly affecting, his tunewriting deserved its critical commendation. If John Lennon, Paul Simon, and Smith’s more fragile, real predecessors, Tim Hardin and Nick Drake, had emoted a protracted, circle-the-wagons, dark despondency, they’d have written these songs. And like Lennon, Hardin and Drake, Smith’s forever lost to the ages, cut down too young at 34. Alas!