“The arrangements are brilliant, I think, but not difficult. “The writing is so good, but his voice is so attainable,” she says. Dacus, who also plays with Bridgers and Baker in the indie-rock supergroup boygenius, was drawn to how conversational Smith’s work can feel. Take a quick glance at its cover art and you’ll find a candid image of Smith looking up from his cigarette in front of a graffiti’d mirror backstage, at a now defunct club in Arizona where he’d opened for fellow home-recording enthusiasts Sebadoh in 1996: This wasn’t so much a troubled genius as someone you might have passed on the street or sat beside at a dive bar, maybe bumped into in a thrift store. It’s hard to know how much he influenced it or if he just would’ve thrived in this current climate.” “I think that’s such a popular sound now.
“I feel like he definitely inspired a lot of people to just start making shit in their house,” Bridgers says. At no point did it obscure his way with graceful, pristine melody. Like his 1995 self-titled LP and 1994’s Roman Candle before it, Either/Or was recorded in various apartments in his adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, Smith playing every instrument himself. So much of Elliott Smith’s appeal comes down to approachability. “You’ve lived it and understand it, or you haven’t and you won’t be able to. But Smith has become secondhand for something more diffuse and difficult to define: a raw vulnerability that can translate in so many forms. If it’s Springsteen, you’re almost certain to be hit by shiplike choruses laced with sax and bells. If a young songwriter draws influence from Dylan, you’ll likely hear it in an incandescent turn of phrase, or the way they stretch and slant their voice to sound just like his.
It’s not so much about signifiers, though, as it is a feeling.
Everyone I know that makes music is ripping this guy off.’” “Listening to Either/Or,” Dacus says, “I’m like, ‘Oh. He’s left an impression on a cross-section of contemporary pop that transcends genre-from the poetics of Parks and Lucy Dacus to the hushed atmospherics of Eilish, from the open-hearted hip-hop of slowthai to the ambient melancholy of Phoebe Bridgers, whose Grammy-nominated 2020 breakthrough, Punisher, takes its name from a song in which she imagines herself stalking Smith through Silver Lake, the Los Angeles neighborhood he used to haunt.
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His songs have been covered by Billie Eilish, Julien Baker, and Mac Miller, sampled by Lil B, and interpolated by Frank Ocean. Though Smith had clearly come of age studying the melodies of Lennon and McCartney, his river of influence has split and spilled outward in surprising directions, resonating worlds away from its source. Parks’ tattoo is the title of Smith’s definitive 1997 LP, a record that, 25 years later, has become both blueprint and spiritual text for a generation of artists who discovered the singer-songwriter’s work well after his death in 2003. When I'm in the studio, almost every time I’ll think of him: What would he do, or how would he approach the story I have in my head? So, I thought, ‘Why not carry him with me in some way?’” But I see him almost as this presence that follows me. “It’s funny,” the UK singer-songwriter tells Apple Music, “because I know a lot of people-a lot of artists-with Elliott Smith tattoos. On her 21st birthday, Arlo Parks decided to get a new tattoo-the words “Either/Or” inked on her ankle in her close friend’s handwriting.
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