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he standard conceptions of the late Elliott Smith have always shortchanged him. The "sad, sensitive guy" tag does no justice to Smith's anger: take away his soft voice and this is some mean material. He might have sounded like Simon and Garfunkel's right-hand man, but those two never sang "You say you mean well, you don't know what you mean/ Fucking ought to stay the hell away from things you know nothing about."




But the view of Smith as a drug-addled punk denies his uncanny craft — troubling engineer Larry Crane, the archivist for Smith's estate. Said craft is readily apparent from New Moon, a collection of early outtakes assembled by Crane that, as he notes, comprises "a catalog rivaling many songwriters' life's work."



Since Smith's horrifying, baffling death in October 2003, his fans have mourned the absence of new material. The embarrassment of riches here should keep them busy for a long time, and they have Larry Crane to thank for making it happen. Hooksexup spoke to Crane about the project. — Peter Smith




How did you meet Elliott Smith, initially?

We had a lot of mutual friends. We both had home studios that were similarly set up back in '96. I was recording a band called Junior High, featuring Sean Croghan, Joanna Bolme and Janet Weiss [Sleater-Kinney], and Joanna was dating Elliott at the time. I remember her bringing him over to the house for a party, and he asked to see my home studio.

He was very quiet. If you bumped into him somewhere, you probably wouldn't get much out of him until he knew you better. Initially, I knew him through Joanna and lots of other mutual friends, and I didn't know much about his music at all. I just kind of knew him as a person. I bought his records after we started working together.



What did you think of them when you heard them?


I wasn't that big of fan of the earlier Heatmiser, the first two records. It was more of a rockin' thing, and that's not really my style. But then I heard Roman Candle at work one time, and I thought that was pretty interesting. When you're sitting there recording people all the time, you hear pretty mediocre stuff in the majority of the sessions. He just had really great arrangments and structure, and he played a lot of instruments really well. It was a treat.

It turned out he was incredibly prolific. Did he have trouble deciding what should go on which record?

He had a lot of things that he just left around the studio.
He'd just record as much as he could and filter it out. I think he agonized over it. It's funny, there are people on Elliott Smith message boards saying, "I can't believe this wasn't on there, or that wasn't on there." But that was how he felt at the time. With artists, newer material usually gets preference. Even if you've got five really great songs, you might not use them because you've also just written five new songs. People will push aside something that's better quality.

Were you familiar with the songs on New Moon before you went through the archives? Did you know what you were looking for, mostly?

Some of them, yeah. I had DAT tapes that I'd made way back of some of these things. There were a few songs I'd never heard, and there were some things that I'd downloaded from fan trading sites. Sometimes they sounded really bad. I wasn't expecting to find copies that sounded as good as what we got. I found almost all the stuff on multi-track. In some cases there were mixes Elliott had done. Sometimes they felt kind of rushed, and there were sonic mistakes he'd made on a few of them. I had a better tape deck and a better console, so I was able to get better sound off of the tapes than he was at the time.



Were there any songs that you really loved that you weren't able to rescue?


There were some songs that people recommended that they only had low-quality live tapes of, and in those cases there wasn't anything I could do about it. There were some songs that I would have liked to put on there, but it was questionable when they were recorded, and as far as major label contracts go, we didn't want to get into trouble there. We had a cut-off date. There was one song that was a really strange, kind of lo-fi, live track, and we skipped that.

Which song was that?


The title that's written on the case is "Crazy Fucker." [laughs]



There's twenty-four songs on two discs, but they'd all fit onto one disc. Why did you go with two?

The first idea was to do two discs. The first disc would be a proper album and the second would be bonus tracks. But somehow that kind of morphed into just two discs of songs.
When you looked at Either/Or and Elliott Smith, they're twelve songs per album. I think it would have been a heavy clunker to listen to all twenty-four songs in a row. With two discs, it feels more like an artifact and not just a collection.



The album's been out for a couple weeks now. Have you been happy with the response?

I read a review that said that the material from disc one was recorded from Elliott Smith and disc two was Either/Or. It said a song was acoustic that had drums on it. It said that he was a drug addict at the time, which is definitely not true. I mean, I was fucking there. I can tell you that in 1996 and '97, I was not dealing with a addled drug addict. I was dealing with a person who, at the most, would go out and have some beers with me. The review made so many assumptions that it was just a bummer to read.
To the point where the writer said that the major label let him have a steady stream of drugs [laughs]. Oh my God.

Most of the reviews seem to be a vehicle to talk about his life and death, and playing on the Oscars. There's not so much about what's really on this record. I'm trying to take it in stride. I curated it, or helped curate it, but it's not my work. But for my friend, I'm irritated that it's not being taken the way it should. I would think it'd be seen as a collection of songs. This probably could have been released if he was around, you know? Like, "Hey, Elliott, there's a lot of old songs. Can we compile them?" "Oh, sure." I'm sure he would have done it some day. If that were the case, people would say, "Oh look, he did some really good songs back then."



As is inevitable with a posthumous release, there was some bickering among fans about From a Basement on a Hill and what's was wasn't on it. Did you have a different take on that album? Would you have arranged it differently than Joanna Bolme and Rob Schnapf did?

I'd heard a lot of the raw material for that album with Joanna before they went to mix it. We came round the studio one day and listened to a bunch of it for hours, and there were songs where — and this is so hard to explain to the fans — where his voice just sounded pretty bad. He wasn't sounding up to his standards. You've got to make a call in a case like that. I think that, combined with the pressures of an emotionally charged time, was really hard for everybody involved. I've heard complaints about things I did on New Moon — some fans want things to sound more like the bootleg stuff.

Now that he's dead, there's no ultimate authority.

You really can't win.

I don't want to win! [laughs] I mixed what was on the tracks, I didn't have people come in and play for us. Or say, "Oh, I'll put some bass on here." There was one question about a drum track on a song that wasn't used in the bootleg mix, and people were like, "I just can't believe that Larry used the drum track." Elliott played it, he recorded it, it was on the tape, I thought it sounded cool, I just mixed it to my abilities. [laughs] I wasn't trying to ruin anyone's life.

The liner notes and the packaging state repeatedly that the material was very much what was on the tape, not tampered with at all. Were you trying to make a pre-emptive strike against that kind of accusation?

Absolutely. The only song I tampered with was called "New Disaster," where we had a really great vocal take and a really great instrumental take, and I put them together, because the vocal take had a really lousy-sounding guitar and the instrumental tape had no vocals. And it was really beautiful. I tried it as an experiment and played it for the estate and Kill Rock Stars, and everybody was like, "Oh, that's great." That did cause some concern with the estate — we don't want people to think we created all this on ProTools or something. So after that we put the notes in there.

This level of "tampering" would barely be considered production on a big studio album. But he created such an intimate vibe that people get very up-in-arms about there being a middle man, however innocuous.


A lot of fans are like, "Why couldn't you just put it out as it was?" And it was multi-track tapes. We can send you ProTools files, if you want, or two-inch tape copies to pore through. When Elliott passed away he was in the process of making an album, and some things aren't finished. It's not so simple.

For the future Elliott Smiths out there, what's your number one point of advice for home recording?

[laughs] Can I give several points?
Make sure your song is really good and well-arranged. Make sure that your instrument or your voice or whatever sounds really good, in its natural state. And third, make sure you work in a good-sounding space. When people record at home, a lot of times they seem to work in a basement for some reason, and that's usually the worst-sounding space in the house. Lots of times, dining rooms are a little live. Or a living area. Bedrooms don't usually sound so good, they're kind of square and small.


That's a problem for all the mopey singer-songwriters out there.


It kind of fights against what you're trying to do.

His death was so sad and untimely, but the release of this album is heartening. This bounty of new material makes the loss feel a little less total.


I think it's a positive thing, a record like this. The estate and I hope that it's never seen as plundering or capitalist. It's more of a tribute to someone who's not with us anymore.  n°

To order New Moon, click here.

© 2007 Peter Smith & hooksexup.com