Shortly after the release of his fifth studio album, Figure 8 — the last record he’d finish in his lifetime — Elliott Smith told a Boston Herald writer why he was so drawn to that titular image. “I liked the idea of a self-contained, endless pursuit of perfection,” he said. “But I have a problem with perfection. I don’t think perfection is very artful. But there’s something I liked about the image of a skater going in a twisted circle that doesn’t have any real endpoint. So the object is not to stop or arrive anywhere; it’s just to make this thing as beautiful as they can.” That tension — between polish and texture, between pop and punk rock, between best-kept-secret and unlikely superstar — never quite found a steady equilibrium throughout Smith’s glorious, tumultuous career. The fame he began to attract, unwittingly, in the late ’90s (culminating with his tender and unforgettable 1998 Oscar performance of Good Will Hunting ‘s “Miss Misery”) made that balance even more difficult to
The Y'allywood Reporter
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