Though it’s the sort of thing that likely always happens, especially with artists who die prematurely, violently, and unforgettably, it still takes one by surprise; how the death hijacks the life, how everything gets read backwards from a terminus, how the life seems never to have existed without a death in it. It’s a soundtrack you can’t mute. It keeps imposing itself tendentiously. It narrows everything. It’s a fish-eye lens. There’s a funereal aspect to Elliott Smith that’s dislocating. But it’s false. It’s distorting. And from the start my impulse was to reject it. I wrote as if he was alive. I attempted to write in amnesia of the ending I already knew.
- William Todd Schultz
descensus Averno facilis est