And that’s the problem (or may be the solution) with Elliott, you never know what the songs are exactly about. The imagery in this album has made a lot of people said that “All the songs are about drugs”… A one-dimensional interpretation would be a crime for any of Elliott Smith’s tunes, and the drug-explain-it-all take on his songs is such a reductive interpretation it is not even worth mentioning. It’s never this simple and even though all the drug metaphors are clearly intentionally chosen, they are just that, metaphors, metaphors for addiction and alienation. Knowing that Elliott was not using heroin or any other drugs when he wrote these songs but also knowing what happened later in his life, some will say it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As a matter of fact, the realization that some of the song titles are cheap alcoholic beverages (‘Christian Brothers’, ‘St. Ides Heaven’) or possible more dangerous substances (‘The White Lady’) but are also holy imageries, gives a certain mystic quality to the album.
It’s difficult to forget about the suicide scene in ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ when listening to the haunting ‘Needle in the Hay.’ But just like for the drug symbolism evoked by the song, you necessary need to look much further than that. However the source of the ill-being is sometimes hard to find, just like a needle in the hay.
Without any self-pity, the songs materialize such stubbornness and anger that you feel uneasy at times. Despite of what could seem a happy tune, there is a desire of sickness in almost every line of ‘Coming up roses’ (sickle cell, kill you in time, alive in your blood, sore eyes, riding your blood…) as if pain or suffering were appealing diseases: ‘The moon is a sickle cell, It’ll kill you in time’
Some song long for a desire of self-harm (‘it’s sick what I want’) and a determination to go in a place while being conscious of your own fall, but going there anyway. Others songs of the album provoke this exact same feeling of choosing a path of failures rather than redemption that could be offered by others, ‘And I won’t come down for anyone.’ ‘And I don’t need your permission, To bury my love under this bare light bulb.’
‘Clementine’ could be about just that, the resoluteness to prefer the degradation of a relationship once you realize you can’t live up to your own expectations, and ‘The Biggest Lie’ could be about refusing love as something good, a recurrent theme in Elliott’s work, a self-admittance that sickness and pain feel safer and more familiar than an undeserved love.
At the end, the album is an intense search for a hidden source of pain, but all the songs about despair and self degradation are also songs about life and human experience.