Free Elliott Smith's XO by Matthew LeMay Page A

eviscerated on
XO,
but Smith leaves us with a potent parting gift: belief.
    Discussing which tracks were “relevant” to
XO
proves difficult given Smith’s way of working; songs would frequently be abandoned, recycled, and reapproached later. For the sake of casting a net that is not too wide, I am only discussing songs that were originally slated for inclusion on
XO,
and “Miss Misery,” a song that is inexorably tied to this period in Smith’s career.
“Cecilia/Amanda” [Unreleased]
    In looking through a prolific artist’s rarities, songs like “Cecilia/Amanda” are true treasures; beautiful, illustrative songs never completed for release but somehow made more precious by their obscurity.
    Though “Cecilia/Amanda” was originally slated for inclusion on
XO,
Schnapf suggests that Smith neverfinished it to his own satisfaction:
    I don’t think that song was really gonna come to be…. It was a really old song that had been kicking around forever…. It was something he was trying to rework, and it never quite got there. It’s an old song that I think he had written with a friend of his who’s now a doctor.
    That friend is Garrick Duckler, who played with Smith in his high school band Stranger Than Fiction and later co-wrote a cassette’s worth of songs with Smith under the name A Murder of Crows. Only one of Duckler’s collaborations with Smith has been formally released—“Night Cap” from Heatmiser’s
Cop and Speeder
record—but Smith did occasionally use a snippet or idea from Duckler’s music, or in some cases put an entire set of Duckler’s lyrics to his own music.
    Duckler was kind enough to offer some of his recollections of “Cecilia/Amanda”:
    It was [originally] “Celia said to Amanda” not one name “Cecilia-Amanda,” [but] actually he did change it to “Cecilia/Amanda,” which is funny because I remember that Elliott was joking with me that Celia is not really a woman’s name but is the stuff in your lungs and then I told him that the song is really about microscopic parts of the lungs trying to sort out theirproblems. We’d joke around a lot like this. He had a wonderful sense of humor.
    “Cecilia/Amanda” is a favorite among Smith’s fans, and with good cause. Musically, it is one of the most elegant songs in Smith’s repertoire, released or unreleased. The only extant studio version of “Cecilia/Amanda” was recorded at Jackpot!, but a new recording was approached and subsequently abandoned during the
XO
sessions at Sunset Sound. According to Schnapf, the “b-list” string section hired to perform on
XO
(with the exception of ex-Mahavishnu Orchestra violinist Jerrod “Jerry” Goodman) struggled with the bent note that Smith performed on a synthesizer for the Jackpot! demo:
    There were big scoring dates that day, all the really good players were scattered through all the big film studios. It ended up being ok, but there were certain things they could not do. They couldn’t swing at all.
    The skill of the string players notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine a perfect organic realization of the synthesized string bend on the one extant studio recording of “Cecilia/Amanda.” Though the sound quality is less than stellar, the Jackpot! demo of “Cecilia/Amanda” presents a full arrangement much in the vein of “Waltz #2” or “baby Britain,” replete with piano, guitar, bass(courtesy of Quasi’s Sam Coomes) and drums. Lyrically, “Cecilia/Amanda” can be read as a more philosophically adventurous counterpoint to “Baby Britain”—an incisive character sketch of a person who fails to live up to her potential. In “Cecilia/Amanda,” Smith’s interest in personal rupture is given a literal manifestation in the form of a mother and child.
    Smith closes “Cecilia/Amanda” with a play at contrasts:
    Amanda put on a new party dress yesterday
    Dancing to a record you scratched
    Some deal in amateur acting, making opposites match
    This final line appears in