elliott smith
figure 8
Elliot Smith’s Figure 8 is all encompassing of its metaphor, reflecting every sound on his latest album. Self-proclaimed Beatles-fan, but whose sound is more aged, more angst-ridden than the Fabulous Four, he mixes both his lyrics and music into circular patterns.
In "Junk Bond Trader," which has become one of the more well-known songs on Figure 8, Smith muses over lost infatuations. It’s a half-empty glass. "The first true love that folded at the slightest touch, brought down like an old hotel, people digging through the rubble for things they can resell…" All the while the bass harpsichord and intermittent bells build it up and bring it back down.
Smith continues the spirals with tracks like "LA" in which he lauds Patience (if she had a band, he’d "be her biggest fan,"), although the song itself is an impatient wheezing between broken guitar chords and Smith’s omniscient voice, warning against the seemingly happy sound: "but last night I was about to throw it all away."
But Smith’s circles rise out of more than melodies and images, his poetic skill is a major contributor as well. In "Color Bars" he goes so far as to use the actual images of rising and falling into the 8 pattern: "…I’ll be connected to everything, riding high again, high on the sound. . . I ain’t gonna go down, laying low again, high on the sound."
In "In the Lost and Found," the circle gets more twisted when he artfully uses the repetitive piano melody to accompany lyrics which describe walking up stairs, being lost and found, going back and forth against the backdrop of repetition.
In conclusion, Elliot Smith is still his old Indy-rocker self, but of a different brand. The lyrics of Figure 8 are classically bitter, but a little less self-deprecating than most of Smith’s previous laments. He strings off a slew of lyrics like "I don’t need nobody else, I can do it by myself," "Everything means nothing to me," and "I don’t want the lead in your play." He seems to have come a long way from his award-winning Miserable self. He seems to have gotten a bit tougher after moving to LA, but personally, after an extended bonding session with Figure 8, he is to me in his own words: "the lover that I still favor."