In 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.”
Of course, after the album’s release in October of 2004, the sad, suicidal troubadour narrative is the one that stuck. A contemporary New York Times article—one of a handful that Schnapf and Bolme agreed to—was typical; Smith was Gen X’s Mr. Misery, the junkie poet and troubled genius whose last chapter was always destined to be tragic. (That article cranked up the melodrama a bit further, describing Bolme as running out of the interview in tears, when Schnapf says she was simply leaving to use the restroom.) The reviews were unambiguously positive, but even there the mythology was beginning to harden. From a Basement on the Hill was Smith’s musical suicide note, the skeleton key to unlock the last few tumultuous years of his life and explain why he would decide to bring it to an end. By the end of the press cycle, Smith’s actual music started to seem like a subplot in a larger human tragedy.
Nearly 20 years later, can now be seen for what it is—Smith’s loudest, rawest, most experimental release. But we’ll never know for sure what it would have sounded like had he survived to finish it.
