  Elliot Smith Vs.
The World:
His new, well,
kinda new record, Figure 8, is a
delicate yet staunch refusal to even consider the
demands of the marketplace; and it hovers over
the boy bands and Britneys like a
butterfly floating over an assembly line.
By Sean O'Neill
Pando: You’ve been getting
an awful lot of press for this record. Do you
take much stock in it?
E: No. I
don’t like to keep track of myself a whole
lot, you know? Too weird.
Pando: It must be odd seeing
yourself through the prism of someone else’s
perception.
E: Yeah.
It’s a weird prism. Not mine. It
doesn’t make sense to me, so I don’t
look through it very much.
Pando: I interviewed Oliver
Stone once, and the guy was won Oscars, but he
still bleeds about what some schmuck writes about
him in the L.A. Weekly. I couldn’t
believe it.
E: Well,
some people integrate all that into their
identity. I sort of have my own identity
that’s not particularly receptive to that
sort of thing.
Pando: I’d think that
would be essential to keep on going. Worry about
what people will think, and you’d be
paralyzed.
E:
Sometimes it seems like an obstacle, but no,
it’s too weird… reading my own press
would be like sitting in an empty room and
putting on my own record again and again.
Pando: You seem to have such
devoted fans.
E:
It’s nice if that’s true, yeah.
Pando: Don’t you find that
to be the case?
E: Well,
I mean, people seem to come to see me play, so I
guess so.
Pando: Haven’t there been
times when you find that you’re too
important to someone?
E: Yeah,
sometimes there’s someone who becomes a
little obsessive or fixated or something, but
that doesn’t happen all that often. Most
people are really nice, you know? If they bother
to come up and talk to me, they usually say nice
things. They don’t usually say,
"I’m you- You’re an impostor me.
I’m going to kill you."
Pando: You aren’t getting
10 page letters written in really small scrawl?
E:
Occasionally there’s some weirdness, but
mostly it’s just nice.
 Pando: On the new record, some
of the songs seem to be aimed at a particular
person, but they’re kind of diffuse at the
same time. Does that make sense?
E:
That’s a pretty good way to describe it. As
good a way as any. In some ways, I’m the
worst person to describe it, because I don’t
have that much control over how it turns out. Not
any more control than people have over what they
dreamt last night. It has something to do with
me, but it’s not like a prepared speech or
diary or anything. They’re sort of like
these little movies, you know? Maybe I’m one
of the actors in the movies, but sometimes it
seems like I’m playing one role, and the
next year it might seem like that wasn’t me,
that I was actually another character, you know
what I mean? A lot of times, I don’t
actually care to know exactly what, if anything,
they’re about, as long as they just make a
little picture that someone’s imagination,
including mine, can kind of walk around in, check
out, and see if they find something interesting,
you know?
Pando: It’s nice, too,
just to make words jangle sometimes.
E: Yeah.
Words are cool.
Pando: To use words as
instruments, rather than sweating the
meaning…
E Yeah. I
think words are bound to… Every word carries
a whole bunch of meanings behind it, like the
tail of a comet, you know? And it gets really
complicated when you pile them up on each other,
and in a way, it gets so complicated that people
trying to talk about novels can spend an entire
career just talking about one author.
Pando: Get started on Melville
or Joyce, and one lifetime might not be enough.
E: yeah.
The crossword puzzle gets so complicated, but
that’s part of what’s so interesting
about it. If it was really comprehensible, and
you could really understand some song or
something like that, then it wouldn’t be so
interesting to listen to any more, you know? I
can deal with a couple of direct lyrics on a
record of mine, but if they were all songs like
"Somebody That I Used to Know…"
Pando: Or "Easy Way
Out…"
E: Yeah,
if they were all songs that were simple and
direct, then it would be hard for me to sing them
over and over again, because I’d have to go
back to a very specific place to be inside the
song when I’m playing it. And anyway, I feel
like I’ve already made up some pretty
straight, story- type songs in the past, and now
I’m interested in more impressionistic,
fragmented little movies. You know?
Email Sean O'Neill
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