20TH ANNIVERSARY
I
n the fall of 2004, Rob Schnapf and Joanna Bolme didn’t really want to talk to the press. Having combed through 45 hours of material to assemble the final Elliott Smith album, From a Basement on the Hill, they were the only logical choices to field the questions Smith was no longer around to answer. When Smith died in October of 2003, Schnapf noticed a trend in the press coverage surrounding his passing. Those who knew Smith best—former bandmates, friends, collaborators—weren’t the ones telling his story, and the one that was emerging was mythologizing him into a caricature, the joyless patron saint of self-destructive indie rockers. Bolme and Schnapf decided to talk, if only to remind everyone that Smith was a brilliant artist, too. “We wanted to control the narrative and keep it focused on the music and not the easy part of writing about ‘Oh, the sad suicidal troubadour, blah blah blah,’” Schnapf recalls, now 17 years later. “He wasn’t planning any of what happened. He was making a record, and this was the record he was making.”
