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

of running under the gun, abandons “the business life” to “write down my favorite sounds.” He sees the beauty in the trees, feels the cool and autumn breeze. “I’m outward bound” he declares, leaving the cities and the towns. “My life has just begun.”
    “Basically,” Pickle recalls, “it was ‘This is what I like about the Northwest.’ He’d been there a few times to visit his father Gary in Portland. Not exactly a ‘fuck you’ to Texas, really. Objective observer-type stuff about the feelings he got when he spent time with his dad. So he’s in the song too.”
    Strikingly, the time signature is ¾. The song, in some ways Elliott’s most complete, is a waltz, in other words, like many of the country/western tunes he could not help but absorb in those days, and also like several Beatles numbers, such as “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” and “Norwegian Wood” (whose time signature is a waltzy 6/8 rather than the more common ¾). “We had done plenty of ¾ in band class too,” Pickle explains,so although the form itself wasn’t unprecedented, its effect on Elliott was. From the very beginning, waltzes had resonance. Later Elliott made use of ¾ again and again, returning to it either unconsciously or with deliberate intent, it’s hard to say. Something about its jaunty timings jibed ideally with his rhythmic sensibilities even back in eighth and ninth grade.
    Beyond that, the waltz form seemed also to summon ancient feelings, acting as emotional trigger (or vice versa). It signified childhood mysteriously. So often, when Elliott turns to those days in his more mature songs, he drops into the same evocative time signature. “Flowers for Charlie” is a waltz. So is “No Confidence Man,” yet another Charlie-themed number. The list of Elliott waltzes is long. He even noticed it now and then in interviews. Not every one centers on childhood or Charlie, but enough do that the link comes to seem less than accidental. Waltz is the dream, childhood the dream’s latent content, its emotional subtext, one aligned with the other in symbiosis.
    “Waltz #2 (XO),” for instance, the third song on Elliott’s 1998
XO
album—there is also a “Waltz #1”—is his certain masterpiece. It’s got a roadhouse, Wild West, player-piano feel to it. And yet again, the tune, with its staccato ¾ beat, takes him back to Cedar Hill, the suburbs of Texas with Bunny and Charlie. Waltz “Outward Bound” was no Texas fuck you, more a love letter to wet, green Oregon, and to father Gary Smith and the promise of a new life he’d been getting tastes of during those semi-regular trips up north. There’s love in “Waltz #2 (XO)” as well—qualified—but a deeper impulse is anger, aimed squarely at Charlie. Brilliantly laid out in metaphorical cloakings, the song’s a secret life history, summarizing Elliott’s feelings about the Cedar Hill atmosphere and the intricacies of his relationship with mother and stepfather. He was always exceptionally worried about the possible hurtfulness of his lyrics. The thought that they might cause harm pained him. So a habit was established according to which he’d begin songs directly, explicitly autobiographically, then revise away from fact toward vagueness and abstraction. Choice specifics grounded the song, but meanings trailed off into obscurity. Emotionally, it was an elision of the personal—there but camouflaged—a self-erasure. He was in the songs, they were him, it was his personal past reconsidered, the sum total of who he was, but they were more too, a mix of voices, first, second, and thirdperson, all getting a word in, all with something crucial to say. “XO,” as Smith told an interviewer in 1998, means “hugs and kisses,” the sort of thing people throw in at the end of letters. A more arcane, connotative meaning was “fuck off.” “But that’s a really rare meaning I didn’t know about,” Elliott explains, apparently sincerely.
    “Waltz #2