Basement on the Hill

basement would eventually turn up in the album’s title. Smith had found his place to get lost, and, for the following few months at least, he knew exactly what he wanted.

“It was going to be a double album, 32 tracks, and he had this very complete vision,” McConnell recalls, explaining that he and Smith quickly bonded over their love of analog equipment and experimental recording techniques. He wanted to make something less impressionistic, Smith said, to play with form in a way he never had before. Where his previous two records had been tightly constructed and focused, this one would sprawl, getting weirder and weirder until it dissolved into noise. As soon as he walked through the door, Smith was ready with his frst assignment, asking McConnell to do a mix of a complicated piano ballad with the working title “True Love is a Rose.” A few hours later, satisfed with McConnell’s work, Smith would jump right into “Shooting Star,” a stinging rebuke to a former lover that served as a jumping off point for the near two years of experimentation that would follow.

“There was a lot of energy in the air,” McConnell says. “But then Elliott, because he was using chemicals to help him, he would stay up sometimes for two or three days, and he’d want to work through the night. And I couldn’t because I’m not comfortable doing hard drugs, so I really struggled with sleep deprivation. So I would go nap for three or four hours while he was working by himself. And sometimes I was sleeping right in the control room on my bed in my bedroom, right next to him while he was recording. Then he’d wake me up a few hours later, like, ‘Alright, man. That’s enough sleep. Let’s get back to work!’ So he was very obsessive about the process.”

Having proven his mastery of the confessional pop form on his previous two albums, Smith was eager to blow up his earlier templates. Though he had recorded workable versions of a handful of tracks with Brion, he had no interest in using them now. If XO and Figure 8 had been expert exercises in meticulous pop classicism, he wanted something that was wild and unpredictable, ugly and unkempt where his former releases had been clean and comprehensible. He wasn’t only burning bridges with those closest to him; he appeared to be burning bridges to prior versions of himself.

“If his voice wasn’t on it, you almost wouldn’t know that it’s Elliott,” McConnell says of the music they were making. “He kept talking about going back to his roots, but he ended up just trying to create entirely new sounds. You could tell his songwriting was still very Elliott Smith, because it was so deep in its form and so complex. The writing was defnitely progressing naturally, but it was the progression that he was looking to change at the time. He really liked the records he had done already. He knew that they were quality. He wasn’t dissing his former engineers or producers. He was saying, ‘I want something different now for this one. I really want to get out there with it a little bit and experiment.’ So that’s what we did.”

The tracks they created represent the gnarliest and most visceral of Smith’s career, with knotty tangles of detuned guitars and thundering drums providing a perfect counterpoint to the haunted, aching ballads that were his stock in trade. Opener “Coast to Coast” hits as hard as anything in his catalog, rising like a monster out of a sea of noise, with churning drums and swirling guitar lines licking around the edges of Smith’s vocal. A master of metaphor, Smith never wrote more directly about addiction than on “Strung Out Again” and “King’s Crossing”—two tracks that ride a dark pulse of queasy guitars to add a sense of menace to Smith’s soft vocals. He directly addresses the topic of death several times, even declaring his readiness for it at one point, but the album is more existential than funereal. Instead of a rumination on his coming demise, it’s a statement of frustration about what he has become—namely the sad, suicidal troubadour whose grief is his brand. Underlying it all is a subtle recognition that by making another album about despair and self-doubt, Smith was only reinforcing the narrative he was kicking against.

From day one, McConnell says he knew that working with Smith was going to represent a different sort of challenge. This was the period when the chaos of Smith’s private life began to spill out into the open. At an August 2001 performance at the Los Angeles Sunset Junction Street Fair, he appeared gaunt and frail, fumbling through his set before apologizing for being too “fucked up” to play. He became paranoid, believing that DreamWorks was sending spies to follow him around Los Angeles in unmarked white vans, their agents breaking into his apartment to steal music from his computers. Though he talked often about suicide, McConnell says, Smith had decided he would rather slowly ruin his health through substance abuse than deliberately take his own life. He didn’t want to die—at least not all of the time—but was willing to take the chance.

“I just remember this one song. And it’s a beautiful piece of music, and you know exactly what he was going to do, but he just never got to do it.”

– Rob Schnapf

“He said, ‘Look, I do a lot of drugs. And I’m going to do them in front of you, and I don’t want you to criticize me for it,’” McConnell recalls. “And it was like, ‘Shit...okay.’ And so that was one of the frst things that I knew I was dealing with. He didn’t want to be criticized for his poor choices, and I believe that’s probably best when somebody is struggling. So I didn’t. Instead I just tried to be supportive and be a friend and keep him safe. When he would do so many drugs where I got scared that he might have OD’d or that he might do something stupid, I tried to watch him and make sure he was safe. I was always ready to call for help if need be, and I tried to encourage him to stay focused on the recording process and eat. He didn’t like to sleep. Sometimes I would take him out to lunch, because I had to eat. I’d be like, ‘If you want to talk about the record, you’ve got to go to lunch with me.’” McConnell looks back on the period fondly, recalling long conversations about songwriting and late-night recording sessions that dissolved into giddy fts of laughter as the two took turns telling jokes. Smith was a harsh critic of his own work, but he seemed genuinely content with the tracks they were making, McConnell says. The two of them would spend afternoons driving around LA, blasting the mixes they were making out of Smith’s car speakers. They became friends, so much that Smith presented McConnell with the acoustic Gibson guitar that he played on the Academy Awards as a gesture of gratitude. (McConnell returned the guitar to Smith’s family after his passing.) From a Basement on the Hill didn’t end up being the album they talked about making, but McConnell is quick to point out that Smith was an incurable perfectionist who frequently revised his ideas, making it just about impossible to know what the fnal album would have sounded like had he survived.

Flush with major label cash, Smith was spending an obscene amount of money on illicit substances, so much so that McConnell encouraged him to redirect his spending toward building a studio just so he’d have something tangible left. That kicked off a new addiction, and Smith began spending so much time researching and repairing the gear he was buying on eBay for his eventual New Monkey Studio that he began to lose focus on making music.

Eventually, Smith went to rehab and McConnell heard less and less from him during the last year of his life, one that by most accounts was relatively happy and stable. It was at New Monkey Studio that Under the Radar conducted the last interview of Smith’s life, fnding him clean and sober and excited to explain why his new tracks represented a kind of creative rebirth. Given the fragile state of Smith’s newfound sobriety, McConnell believes that Smith’s new girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, was pruning away anyone who had been associated with him during the turmoil of the preceding years. Smith wasn’t burning bridges anymore, but most paths to him seemed to be closed for repairs.

“I think he really had a lot to prove to himself and also to the people around him,” McConnell says. “He really did care what people thought about him, despite what I’ve heard people say. And he was defnitely a very sensitive person, like a lot of creative people are. People will tell you a lot of musicians are doing it because they want to fnd that love. They want to fnd their place. They want to fnd meaning in the world, but they also want to be appreciated. Unfortunately, when he died, a lot of his wishes died with him. The record still turned out great, don’t get me wrong. But there was some stuff that was really magic that didn’t make it onto the album—just amazing, like some of his best music ever. So I’m kind of bummed that we never got to fnish the project and deliver it to the labels.”

A SETTING SUN

Rob Schnapf doesn’t recall the exact reasons that the Smith family approached him and Smith’s former girlfriend and confdant Joanna Bolme about completing From a Basement on the Hill, but he remembers feeling a responsibility—almost paternalistic in nature—to help his friend one last time. Having produced Smith’s work stretching back to his days in Heatmiser—the next-big-thing post-punk act that dissolved when Smith’s solo career began to take off—Schanpf doubtlessly logged more studio hours with him than anyone else during his creative life. Though he hadn’t been involved with any part of the recording process, Schnapf says that Smith had been reaching out to him in the months before his death. With a reported

50 tracks at some level of completion, it was clear that Smith left behind a mess.

“We had the list of what he wanted, and that’s pretty much the record,” Schnapf says. “Then there was a lot of stuff that we just couldn’t fnd. ‘King’s Crossing,’ for example. That song I went to mix, and it was on two-inch tape, and it consisted of a stereo mix on the two-inch and a vocal. And it was impossible; I couldn’t mix it. They just didn’t go together. And it ended up being this forensic thing, because he had been recording on every single format. There were all kinds of digital formats; it wasn’t just ProTools. It was all of them,” he laughs. “So there was some stuff we couldn’t fnd or there was stuff that he never got to do the vocal yet. I just remember this one song. And it’s a beautiful piece of music, and you know exactly what he was going to do, but he just never got to do it.”

The tracks seemed to span the length of Smith’s career, and Schnapf was convinced that he’d heard Elliott play early versions of some of them during their previous work together. Two songs from Smith’s list were left off. The family pulled back “Abused,” a solemn ballad that erupts into a power-pop anthem. Knowing that its title alone would make it ripe for misinterpretation, Schnapf decided against including “Suicide Machine,” a track that would have been one of the more upbeat songs on the album had it been included. Hoping that working on the unreleased material would provide a kind of catharsis, Schnapf soon found himself so lost in the work of editing and mixing that it was easy to forget Smith would never hear the fnal product. But Elliott was never far away, his presence reasserting itself in every chair creak and drag on a cigarette that surrounded the music on the tapes. Until the album was fnished, at least, Elliott Smith was still alive.

“I remember getting it all done, fying to New York to Sterling Sound, getting it mastered, and going out that night to meet GGGarth,” Schnapf says, mentioning Garth “GGGarth” Richardson, the producer known for his work with Rage Against the Machine and metal acts. “He’s an awesome guy. We went out for drinks afterwards that night, and he said, ‘How did it go?’ And I was just like, ‘Bwah…’ Something happened and I just cried on his shoulder,” Schnapf says with a tone of disbelief. “That’s not something I do.”

After the album was completed, Schnapf couldn’t listen to it or anything else he’d done with Smith. Expecting From a Basement on the Hill to have its detractors, he was nonetheless frustrated by listeners who griped about the song selection or mixing choices. The reviews were fantastic, but Smith’s death had made every lyric carry a different weight, with armchair psychologists eager to solve the mystery of Smith’s death by piecing together the larger narrative of the album. The album that Schnapf and Bolme had hoped would be a celebration of Smith’s life had been rendered just another piece of evidence to fgure out why he was gone. “A lot of that stuff—overdose, suicide—it’s just one fash of a mistake,” Schnapf says. “And that ends up marking the memory forever. And it just casts this huge shadow over your entire life, but, really, it’s this one decision. There aren’t clues. There isn’t

Elliott Smith at New Monkey Studio in Los Angeles in 2003.

meaning. This wasn’t planned. Who knows what the fuck happened there? I don’t know. And nobody is going to fgure it out, either.”

As the more salacious aspects of Smith’s life began to crowd out the discussion of his actual music, Schnapf had an uneasy realization. If a multifaceted individual such as Smith could be reduced to a caricature within days of his death, how many times had history reduced a person’s life—let alone a far more complicated historical event—into something that barely represented the larger truth? How could you trust anything you read in the media after seeing the process unfold in real time? By the end of 2004, Schnapf was exhausted. His friend was gone, and fnishing his fnal work had failed to bring any closure. He put From a Basement on the Hill out of his mind, fled it away as representative of something he just didn’t want to think about anymore.

“What’s weird is that I listened to it last night for the frst time since then, and I didn’t have any of those feelings when I heard the record,” Schnapf says. “I was like, ‘Ah, this is a really cool record.’ I never listened to it, just because of all of those feelings that happened to me, and I didn’t really want to go there again. And I didn’t get any of that. I just felt all of the music, and I just really enjoyed it. That was really nice.”