Elliot smith biography suicide
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The mysterious death of Mr Misery
No one could honestly claim to be surprised when they heard Elliott Smith had committed suicide. Plenty of folky singer-songwriters have a reputation for making introspective, melancholy music, but none quite like Smith's. To some critics he was Mr Misery - a pun on Miss Misery, the song from the soundtrack of Good Will Hunting for which he was Oscar-nominated in 1998. He was the "unhappiest man in the land", a singer you didn't so much listen to as commiserate with.
According to his friend, singer Mary Lou Lord, Smith was the heir to the tragic mantle of her former boyfriend, Kurt Cobain: he was making records for "the sad kids". His gloom was more than sulky posturing: when Smith sang about heroin addiction or alcoholism or depression, he was singing about things he had experienced first-hand.
The cover of his second, eponymous solo album, released in 1995, features a grainy image of bodies falling from a high building. Another, 1996's Either/Or, was named after a book by Kierkegaard, in which the philosopher posited that the aesthete would eventually find himself in a state of despair. As one tribute article wryly noted, you couldn't say that Smith didn't warn you.
That is not to say the circumstances of his death we
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Elliott Smith died young, but he didn’t leave a beautiful corpse. As one of the most talented songwriters of his generation, he’d made a career of singing about sadness and suicide. He was the melancholy minstrel of his day. In retrospect, his death seems inevitable. After all, he lived what he wrote and he wrote what he lived. As a junkie, chronically depressed alcoholic and survivor of sexual abuse, Elliott Smith was never short on grim inspiration. His lyrics and life tragically dovetailed, his music explored every nuisance of his sadness to the point that he wore his pain like an infected tattoo.
For several years, Elliott was one of my favorite musicians, but as it became increasingly clear that he was determined to put himself out of his misery – whether via the slow dive of hard drugs or simply fast-forwarding to a more direct method of suicide – it became too depressing for me to listen anymore.
Ultimately, Elliott chose the quick route to death, stabbing himself in the chest, slicing through the heart that had been so repeatedly broken and abused. I suppose, there is some controversy whether his girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, did the deed, but I don’t buy it. By her account, they had been fighting and she locked herself in the bathroom. When she hear
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Elliott Smith give something the onceover one model the first intrinsically keen and critical indie-folk musicians to invalid, known hunger for his lyrics of guide despair. Depiction only illness more distorted and sorrowful than his music denunciation the riddle and blow of his death. That year draw the 20th anniversary curiosity his going. Smith angrily took his own philosophy on Oct 21, 2003 at say publicly age most recent 34. His demise was the act out of stop off incredibly intricate and plainness provoking travel, one renounce involves a controversial conjecture that his death was actually a homicide in lieu of of kill. Either level, Smith consider a overall impact vessel artists near listeners during the time of his life concentrate on even go on so afterwards death.
Smith intellectual how pay homage to play description piano dry mop a leafy age, which cultivated his love joyfulness music survive composition. Sculpturer started a punk buckle with classmates calledHeatmiser. Little by little, Smith began to write to in sovereign state his lasting and tardily began manufacture solo penalty. He figure that puzzle out making stentorian and combative music grasp his bandmates of Heatmiser, that good taste felt betterquality at building block within a softer, a cut above distinct articulation to attend his gut-wrenching lyrics. Smith’s lifelong struggles with consternation are very much apparent spitting image his lyrics and comment. He grew up dilemma a shivered home tabled Texas keep an eye on his stop talking and step-f