On Thursday, a video I've been waiting to see for years was posted on Paul Thomas Anderson's YouTube page. It is the pilot episode for The Jon Brion Show, directed by Anderson in 2000 and ultimately shelved when VH1 decided not to pick it up. The program was inspired by Brion's collaborative shows at LA-club Largo, which featured singer/songwriters like Fiona Apple, Jackson Browne, Rickie Lee Jones, Gillian Welch, and most pertinent to this post, Elliott Smith.
Taped after the recording of Figure 8, the video below features Smith originals as well as a few choice covers. I miss him immensely.
On August 6th, on what would have been Elliott Smith's 42nd birthday, an artist took to restoring the iconic Silver Lake mural which appears on the cover of Elliott's 2000 album Figure 8.
The mural has become a popular place for fans to leave memorial tributes and messages to the deceased artist. It's also seen its share of general vandalism and tagging over time, so a restoration was needed. A previous restoration took place in 1998, but it did not include a stencil of Elliott himself.
Here's the wall before:
And here, after:
Elliott Smith - "In The Lost And Found (Honky Bach)"
The 1998 Elliott Smith promotional film, Strange Parallel, finally made its way onto YouTube in its entirety. The film, directed by Steve Hanft, is about 30 minutes long and is part documentary, part experimental film. It's got some great footage, even if the picture and sound quality aren't perfect. I'd like to see this released in proper form some time in the near future.
Director Steve Hanft, about the film:
“In 1998 I was hired to make a film for the reclusive rocker Elliott Smith. Very excited, I flew to Portland, Oregon, where he was staying and met with him to figure it out before we filmed. At the meeting he explained, in a very quiet voice, with a slight smile, that he didn’t want it to be a straight-up documentary. So I suggested he write down some of his dreams. The next day, we met again, and he began talking a lot, and louder, telling me all about how he “had a fucked up dream last night.” It was very funny when he explained it, everyone in and around the music business he was in was telling him to get a mechanical hand to replace the hand that he’d trained for so long to play guitar. There was also a military recruiter who came into the bar where he was writing a song that would yell at him for no reason, and Satan was there, that kills me. A lot of people who know him from his music don’t understand that he was really funny. So we wrote the dream into the shot list and intercut it into the more traditional music footage. It was hard to get the documentary footage out of him, he hated being interviewed. He was much more into the dream sequence and we had a lot fun shooting it. It was an amazing experience and just knowing a guy like that, so talented and brutally honest, has changed my life. Bless him.”
Watch it here:
UPDATE - Video has been taken down by UMG, I will repost when it becomes available again.
As many of you know, I am unabashed about my love for Elliott Smith; he is my favorite songwriter. The dude's never written a bad song in my book.
So you can imagine my excitement when a previously unreleased song, "Grand Mal", leaked onto the Sweet Adeline message boards this week. The song was probably recorded during the sessions for XO (which had the working title of Grand Mal) and is likely a demo, given Elliott's voice coming in at the end saying, "Forget it, now it's too fast."
Update:Apparently the song has been removed from YouTube and the Sweet Adeline link has also been broken. I'll try to update with some new locations when they inevitably become available.
Another Update: You can still download the track here.
Yet Another Update: You're shit out of luck. You can no longer download or stream it for now. Email me and maybe you'll get lucky.
