Friday, October 25, 2013

'To Elliott, With Love'

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