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Album Info

From A Basement On The Hill

From A Basement On The Hill

By Elliott Smith

Alternative - 2004

It’s impossible to divorce Elliott Smith’s From a Basement on the Hill from the album’s disastrous, tragic context. Nearly a... more

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About From A Basement On The Hill

It’s impossible to divorce Elliott Smith’s From a Basement on the Hill from the album’s disastrous, tragic context. Nearly a year to the day before its 2004 release, Smith died from potentially self-inflicted stab wounds in his Los Angeles home. The three years since the release of Figure 8 had been tumultuous for Smith, who was disappointed with the album’s sales, as well as what he saw as invasive meddling from his record label, DreamWorks. He eventually split with his longtime manager, and had to walk away from sessions with producer Jon Brion, after Smith’s substance use disorder began interfering with their work. But as he continued to toil on new material with fellow musician David McConnell, inching toward completion, Smith got clean, giving up drugs and alcohol after his habits almost killed him—a turnaround that made his death, at the age of 34, all the more shocking. In the months that followed Smith’s death, Rob Schnapf—who’d produced XO, and who’d split with Smith in the early 2000s—worked to finish the album with a small coterie of friends. The result, From a Basement on the Hill, remains a brilliant if imperfect testament to Smith’s ideal version of pop music: Emotionally intense and bone-deep, but compulsive and beautiful just the same. Less polished and kaleidoscopic than Figure 8, these songs hit a bit harder, thanks to either their unguarded intimacy, or through Smith’s rock arrangements—easily his most driving since his days in Heatmiser. Documenting his struggles with addiction and demons at large, the opening track, “Coast to Coast,” hinges on the kind of slashing guitars epitomized by The Beatles (not to mention OK Computer-era Radiohead). His voice cresting over demented keyboards and plangent guitars, Smith tries to wean himself from his habits on the churning “Don’t Go Down.” But his music was rarely prettier than on the ghostly “A Fond Farewell” or the galloping “Memory Lane”—both sublime attempts to assuage woes of the past before they cut off the future. Across the album’s 15 songs, Smith commits the battles of his life and death to tape. Smith was reportedly a month away from final mixes on much of this material before his death, and Schnapf and company certainly made decisions in finishing the work that the singer wouldn’t have approved. But From a Basement on the Hill remains a devastating portrait of one of the most talented and complicated songwriters—as well as a masterful suggestion of what Smith could have become. These are some of his absolute best songs, written with an unflinching and precise candor, and rendered with a keen understanding of five decades of rock history. From a Basement on the Hill is as close to perfect as the rock phase of Smith’s music ever got, even if he wasn’t around to finish it.
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