Steven Paul Smith (August 6, 1969 – October 21, 2003), known as Elliott Smith, was an American musician and singer-songwriter. Raised primarily in Texas, he lived much of his life in Portland, Oregon, where he gained popularity in the 1990s. Smith's primary instrument was the guitar, though he also played piano, clarinet, bass guitar, drums, and harmonica. His work was distinguished by his "whispery, spiderweb-thin" vocal style, his "artful chord changes," and his themes of "addiction, depression, and alienation.". The New Musical Express (NME) described him as a "widely adored singer-songwriter," who "touched countless lives with his compelling musicianship and lyricism."
After playing in the rock band Heatmiser for several years, Smith began his solo career in 1994, with releases on the independent record labels Cavity Search and Kill Rock Stars (KRS). In 1997, he signed a contract with DreamWorks Records, for which he recorded his final two albums. Smith's song "Miss Misery", recorded for the film Good Will Hunting (1997), was nominated for the 1998 Academy Award for Best Original Song.
A recovering heavy drinker and drug user, Smith was also diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and depression. His struggle with substances and mental illness affected his life and work, and often appeared in his lyrics. He died at his Los Angeles home from two stab wounds to the chest at age 34 in 2003. The autopsy evidence did not determine whether the wounds were self-inflicted. At the time of his death, Smith was working on his album From a Basement on the Hill, which was posthumously produced and released in 2004.
Steven Paul Smith was born on August 6, 1969, at the Methodist Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska, the only child of Gary Smith, a student at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and Bunny Kay Berryman, an elementary school music teacher. His parents divorced when he was six months old, and Smith moved with his mother to Duncanville, Texas. He had half-siblings through his mother, Darren Welch and Ashley Welch, and a half-sister Rachel Smith through his father. Smith later had a tattoo of a map of Texas drawn on his upper arm and said: "I didn't get it because I like Texas, kind of the opposite. But I won't forget about it, although I'm tempted to because I don't like it there."
Smith endured a difficult childhood and a troubled relationship with his stepfather Charlie Welch. Smith stated he may have been sexually abused by Welch at a young age—an allegation denied by Welch. He wrote about this part of his life in "Some Song". The name "Charlie" also appears in songs "Flowers for Charlie" and "No Confidence Man". In a 2004 interview, Jennifer Chiba, Smith's partner at the time of his death, said that Smith's difficult childhood was partly why he needed to sedate himself with drugs as an adult: "He was remembering traumatic things from his childhood – parts of things. It's not my place to say what."
For much of his childhood, Smith's family was a part of the Community of Christ but began attending services at a local Methodist church. Smith felt that going to church did little for him, except make him "really scared of Hell". In 2001, he said: "I don't necessarily buy into any officially structured version of spirituality. But I have my own version of it."
Smith began playing piano at age nine, and at ten began learning guitar on a small acoustic guitar bought for him by his father. At this age he composed an original piano piece, "Fantasy", which won him a prize at an arts festival. Many of the people on his mother's side of the family were non-professional musicians; his grandfather was a Dixieland drummer, and his grandmother sang in a glee club.
At fourteen, Smith left his mother's home in Texas and moved to Portland, Oregon, to live with his father, who was then working as a psychiatrist. It was around this time that Smith began using drugs, including alcohol, with friends. He also began experimenting with recording for the first time after borrowing a four-track recorder. At high school, Smith played clarinet in the school band and played guitar and piano; he also sang in the bands Stranger Than Fiction and A Murder of Crows, billed as either Steven Smith or "Johnny Panic". His bandmates included Jason Hornick. He graduated from Lincoln High School as a National Merit Scholar.
After graduation, Smith began calling himself "Elliott", saying that he thought "Steve" sounded too much like a "jock" name, and that "Steven" sounded "too bookish". According to friends, he had also used the pseudonym "Elliott Stillwater-Rotter" during his time in the band A Murder of Crows. Biographer S. R. Shutt speculates that the name was either inspired by Elliott Avenue, a street that Smith had lived on in Portland, or that it was suggested by his then-girlfriend. A junior high acquaintance of Smith speculates Smith changed his name so as not to be confused with Steve Smith, the drummer of Journey.
In 1991, Smith graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts with a degree in philosophy and political science. "Went straight through in four years", he explained to Under the Radar in 2003. "I guess it proved to myself that I could do something I really didn't want to for four years. Except I did like what I was studying. At the time it seemed like, 'This is your one and only chance to go to college and you had just better do it because some day you might wish that you did.' Plus, the whole reason I applied in the first place was because of my girlfriend, and I had gotten accepted already even though we had broken up before the first day." His undergrad senior thesis was titled "Toward a Post-Structuralist Feminist Jurisprudence" and was heavily inspired by philosopher Catharine Mackinnon. After he graduated, he "worked in a bakery back in Portland with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and legal theory".
While at Hampshire College, Smith formed the band Heatmiser with classmate Neil Gust. After Smith graduated from Hampshire, the band added drummer Tony Lash and bassist Brandt Peterson and began performing around Portland in 1992. The group released the albums Dead Air (1993) and Cop and Speeder (1994), as well as the Yellow No. 5 EP (1994) on Frontier Records. They were then signed to Virgin Records to release what became their final album Mic City Sons (1996).
Around this time, Smith and Gust worked a number of odd jobs around Portland, including installing drywall, spreading gravel, transplanting bamboo trees, and painting the roof of a warehouse with heat reflective paint. The pair were also on unemployment benefits for some time, which they considered an "artist grant".
Smith had begun his solo career while still in Heatmiser, and the success of his first two releases created distance and tension with his band. Heatmiser disbanded prior to the release of Mic City Sons, prompting Virgin to put the album out inauspiciously through its independent arm Caroline Records. A clause in Heatmiser's record contract with Virgin meant that Smith was still bound to it as an individual. The contract was later bought out by DreamWorks prior to the recording of his album XO.
In the early 1990s, Smith's girlfriend at the time convinced him to send a tape of songs he had recently recorded on a borrowed four-track to Cavity Search Records. Cavity owner Christopher Cooper asked to release the entire album of songs, which surprised Smith, as he was expecting only a deal for a seven-inch record. The album became Smith's release Roman Candle (1994).
Smith said: "I thought my head would be chopped off immediately when it came out because at the time it was so opposite to the grunge thing that was popular ... The thing is that album was really well received, which was a total shock, and it immediately eclipsed [Heatmiser], unfortunately." Smith felt his solo songs were not representative of the music Heatmiser was making: "The idea of playing [my music] for people didn't occur to me ... because at the time it was the Northwest—Mudhoney and Nirvana—and going out to play an acoustic show was like crawling out on a limb and begging for it to be sawed off."