Free Elliott Smith's XO by Matthew LeMay

beautifully rendered on
XO,
as Smith’s unaccompanied, multitracked vocals finally join in unison at the song’s end). By November of 1997, Smith was performing the song with what would be the final revision of its closing words:
    You once talked to me about love
    And you painted pictures of a Neverneverland
    And I could have gone to that place
    But I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand
    Smith finishes
XO
as he began it: with a picture. This time, the picture is not of the lyrically ubiquitous“you and me,” but rather of the quite unexpected “Neverneverland.” In J. M. Barrie’s original
Peter Pan,
we are given a clue as to why this fictional place might be relevant to Smith:
    I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.
    Here, Barrie describes “Neverland”
not
just as a place where you never grow up, but rather as a place whereyour imagination dictates reality; a world forged of the mind that is not “pitch-black” but rather enlivened by “astonishing splashes of color.” Furthermore, Barrie’s “Neverland” is not a simple utopia, nor is it a place of unbridled escapism. Like a child’s imagination, it is populated by both the mundane and the fantastical; the beautiful and the grotesque. It is an imaginary world haunted by reality.
    Perhaps, then, Smith’s assertion that he “could have gone to that place” isn’t all that far-fetched. After all, Neverneverland is a place accessed not by knowledge, but by
belief.
It is “wonderful, lovely thoughts,” and the magical dust of a fairy, that grants you flight to Neverland. And, as Peter tells Wendy, a lack of belief not only closes off Neverland, it literally
kills
the magical beings who take you there: “Every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.” If we picture love as a Neverneverland, then perhaps it, too, is something that can only exist if we believe in it. Indeed, for all the sadness expressed on
XO,
there is just as strong a pull against it. “I’m not half what I wish I was.” “You’ve got a look in your eye when you’re saying goodbye, like you want to say hi.” Darkness is inescapable on
XO,
but it is not valued.
    In an August 1998 interview with
Well Rounded Entertainment,
Smith repeated a line he gave in manyinterviews to counter his image as a “sad sack”: “If there was one kind of song I wish I could write it would be more like ‘I Second That Emotion,’ by Smokey Robinson than like some really dark, depressing song.” In a strange way, Smith both addresses and enacts his wish with “I Didn’t Understand.” While the song is not triumphant—Smith
didn’t
go to that place—he
does
understand, now, that it is not impossible. Knowledge and certainty are