Free Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith by William Todd Schultz

really. It’s usually a sequence instead, that has some implied melody in it.” He says he’s drawn to chords in which the bass note is a fifth—a C with a G in the bass, for instance. He also used half chords—chords in which you don’t want all the strings to sound. His advice to would-be songwriters is to “just relax and stop thinking about what people want to hear. Put it in the blender and see what comes out.”
    That’s what Pickle, Merritt, and Elliott were doing most of the time in Pickle’s home in Duncanville, Texas: throwing things in the blender and seeing how they came out. That Elliott was meticulously, diligently working on and trying out tonal and chordal variations in seventh and eighth grade describes an obvious musical gift. As Denbow said, he rose to the top. It came ridiculously easily and naturally. “He was the guy everything was centered around,” says Denbow. 23 And just as revealingly, Elliott shared his oversized talent. He wasn’t stingy with it. All the boys took stabs at writing songs, but the band was basically Elliott. Everyone knew that. As Pickle put it, “Elliott was John, Paul, and George, and we were all Ringo.” But Elliott never made anyone
feel
like Ringo. What he gave Pickle, Merritt, and Denbow was an identity, an exciting one, and they have never forgotten that. Their gratitude, expressed with deep emotion, is palpable.
    It wasn’t Elliott’s habit at this stage to name songs (in fact, even many of the songs on his first solo album are unnamed). The majority were repeat exercises, such as “#37,” with its driving electric guitar solo in the middle. Yet most were still enormously challenging for the teenagers to play, legitimate songs with characteristic ABABC pop structure. And Elliott pushed himself. He was aiming for “more advanced songs,” Pickle says (advanced, that is, in relation to peers). “He didn’t like to write songs with fewer than five chords.”
    Over time lyrics entered the mix, straightforward scene-setting reflections, not open to interpretation, according to Pickle, in which Elliott simply described a visual picture. A song called “Ocean” amounted to a three-verse meditation on the sea at night, a kind of literal snapshot, “not distant or impressionistic,” Pickle says, “but more like a photo.” It’s a solemn, creamy, arpeggio-laced melody, sleepy and hypnotic. In recordings Elliott sometimessings it, but Kim does too in alternate takes. The tide is pictured coming in and out along a lonely, moonlit shore. In its solitary way it falls to rest on the beach as Elliott peers out at “the endless moon.” He’s struck by the water’s serenity, magic, and mystery. It floods his house and “takes control of me.”
    From here there followed a metamorphosis into first-person narrative that Pickle traces to a Jackson Browne influence, the songs just a bit more introspective, a bit more confessional and searching. Elliott kept a poster in his bedroom of a halcyon nature scene from the flipside of a brochure advertising the Outward Bound program (which Pickle is quick to point out Elliott did not himself endorse; he just liked the image). The poster inspired a tune Elliott titled “Outward Bound,” recorded in the summer of 1984. 24 Along with the slightly less fully realized “Ocean,” this qualifies as Elliott’s very first fully complete song with both music and lyrics. At least four distinct iterations exist, first with piano accompaniment, later with guitar, some sung by Elliott, some by Kim. Each iteration includes slight lyrical variations. It’s irrepressibly catchy, impossible to hear and not sing. It’s also positive, hopeful, bright, and future oriented, a definite outlier in the Elliott canon. The vibe is country, Kim’s vocal especially sweet and twangy (Pickle notes, “We ran a lot of reverb on it.
A lot
”). The story focuses on moving to a new life in the Northwest, “under a cloudy sky.” The singer, tired