From a Basement on the Hill

Almost exactly a year after his untimely death -- missing the anniversary by just two days -- Elliott Smith's final recordings were released as the From a Basement on the Hill album. Smith had been working on the album for a long time. His last album, Figure 8, had appeared in 2000, and when it came time to record its follow-up, he parted ways with both his major label, Dreamworks, and his longtime producer/engineer, Rob Schnapf, working through a number of different producers, including L.A. superproducer Jon Brion, before recording a number of sessions with David McConnell, which were supplemented with Smith's home recordings. At the time of his death, Smith was still tinkering with the album. There was no final track sequence and only a handful of final mixes; it was closer to completion than Jeff Buckley's For My Sweetheart the Drunk, which he intended to re-record, but it was still up to his family to finalize the record. For various reasons, the family chose to work with Schnapf and Joanna Bolme -- a former girlfriend of Smith and current member of Stephen Malkmus' Jicks -- instead of McConnell, who went on record with Kimberly Chun of The San Francisco Bay Area Guardian the week before the release of From a Basement to state that this album was not exactly what Smith intended it to be. According to McConnell, as well as Elliott Smith biographer Benjamin Nugent, Smith wanted the album to be rough and ragged, and McConnell told Chun that "obviously Elliott did not get his wishes," claiming that three of the songs on the album were considered finished by both him and Smith, but appear on the record in different mixes. ... Read More...