The good folks at Rawkblog posted links this weekend to unfinished/suppressed/demo/rough/discarded/_______ tracks from Elliott Smith's From A Basement on the Hill sessions. As with all the music he released before his death and even the ones he didn't (some of his live recordings on Sweet Adeline are incredible), these outtakes from the "Basement" sessions are remarkable even in their unpolished condition.With Smith's passing, this generation, if not the world, lost one of its most talented songwriters. Nobody evokes the fucked up beauty of life for me as well as he does. He wrote about lost souls and old ghosts with a thoroughly pop sensibility. I can't think of anybody today who writes about gnawing addiction, the mercenary relationship between the artist and the public, the torpor of depression, the alienation that accompanies heavy drug/alcohol abuse, poisoned relationships, the hopes, wonders, despair, and numbing banalities of ordinary life, etc. etc. with the poignancy, unflinching honesty and at the same time, attention to melody as he did.
[Update] The player doesn't seem to be working. The link to this DivShare playlist is here.
[Update] To download tracks, go to the playlist provided in the link above and click on the track titles. To download the first track (Coast to Coast), you need to click on the link on the top right hand side of the page that says, "Download Original."
