Elliott Smith’s self-titled and second album was released in 1995 on Kill Rock Stars. Drug and alcohol references are all over the lyrics of the 12 songs, but, as usual, there is much more than it seems at first, and almost each line can be interpreted at many levels. It should be noted that Elliott was not taking drugs when he wrote this album.
1. Needle In The Hay: The opening track set the mood for the album, it’s a dark song with a scary atmosphere, an obsessive melody guitar line throughout the song, and a voice that whispers closer to your ear than ever.
Of course there is a lot of drug imagery with the repetition of ‘Needle’ and with lines like ‘Strung out and thin’, ‘I’m taking the cure’ ‘6th and Powell’ (where drug dealers hang out in Portland), but as always, the metaphoric lyrics are completely open for interpretation and don’t have to be necessary interpreted. It’s more about feeling than meaning.
According to some fans, Elliott has said the song could be about a drug addict who is in love with a girl who doesn’t love him, so he falls back on his addiction to help him deal with the situation. However nothing in the song leads to such a specific interpretation, there is no girl mentioned, and the line ‘You ought to be proud /That I’m getting good marks’ could be a drug reference (tracks of the needle) or an ironic tirade addressed to his stepfather who should be proud Elliott is getting good grades at school.
But drugs should always be regarded as metaphors for problematic relationships, dependency and depression in Elliott’s world, so it could represent any self-destructive behavior people do when rejected or deprived of love.
It’s also an angry song, he seems to say fuck you to anybody with a line like ‘So leave me alone’, and he sings the song as if he was ready to do the worst thing with lines like ‘A dead sweat in my teeth’.
The title, ‘Needle in the hay’ refers to something difficult to find, a reference to a pain that is difficult to locate, a hidden source of suffering. The character of the song wearing the haystack charm (a needle in a haystack) around his neck, just like a religious icon, is a powerful image, like advertising the source of his torture.
This song was used during the suicide scene for the movie ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ (2001).
2. Christian Brothers: With a powerful melody and some damaging lyrics, the tone of the next song stays angry, determined and full of brutal emotions with lines like ‘No bad dream fucker’s going to boss me around’, or ‘Don’t be cross, it’s sick what I want’. A variation of the f-word is used at several times in the song, ‘fucker’, ‘your motherfucking hand’, ‘fucking clear’, expressing a real degree of anger and violence. The title is a reference to a brand of alcohol, an inexpensive brandy, and like the other alcohols mentioned in this album, there is at the same time a connection with a Christian figure, a reminiscence of the strictly religious Elliott’s upbringing in Texas.
It is difficult to know if Elliott had this in mind but it is interesting to mention that the schools which were funded by the congregation of the Christian Brothers, were the sites of severe physical and sexual abuse toward children. The song seems then once again filled with an intense anger against his stepfather.
3. Clementine: Sung like a slow and sad lullaby or a lost love story with a haunting and ancient-like melody, this song is probably partially inspired from the 1880 popular song Clementine, because of the similarity of the lyrics ‘Oh my darling, Clementine!/Thou art lost and gone forever/Dreadful sorry, Clementine’ which become ‘Oh, my darling/Oh, my darling Clementine/Dreadful sorry, Clementine’ in Elliott’s version. The melancholic lyrics evoke the end of a love affair, the doubt and confusion that follows and the desire to forget everything while falling asleep in a bar. It is also amazing how the lyrics produce a sonic environment as the bartender is singing ‘Clementine’ (probably the old song), and you can hear the sound of the cars in the wet street. The line ‘made an angel in the snow’ is interesting since one of his songs is also titled ‘Angel in the snow’, a double reference to drug and a childhood play.
4. Southern Belle: A nervous guitar line starts the song and the first word you hear is ‘Killing’, as if something terrible was about to happen. Once again it is related to his childhood and the anger he still have toward his stepfather who gives ‘other people hell’ and is ‘killing a southern belle’ (Elliott’s mother). Frustration is all over the song with lines like ‘I live in a southern town/Where all you can do is grit your teeth’ or ‘How come you’re not ashamed of what you are?/And sorry that you’re the one she got?’ An intense song which is more straightforward than many others.
5. Single File: A lot of drug references throughout the song (even the title could be one), in particular with lines like ‘With dying shooting stars’, ‘Is the same kind of scars’, ‘You idiot kid, your arm’s got a death in it’, ‘So help yourself to this bitter pill’, but there is again an indirect use of these allusions. Whatever pain Elliott wanted to exorcise through this song and gain his independence from, it is not necessarily from drug addiction. A single line could be an allusion to conformity that society wants to impose on people and this line ‘But there’s a price you’ll pay/For trying hard to become whatever they are/And saying whatever they say’ seems to explain it. The price people pay to form a single line, to swallow the same ‘bitter pill’ is the lost of their individuality. So it seems we are then very far away from a literal song about drugs.
6. Coming Up Roses: With an upbeat melody, the lyrics of this song are so surrealistically poetic that the drug, death, and disease imagery is fully open to interpretation: ‘The moon is a sickle cell/It’ll kill you in time/You cold white brother riding your blood’.
‘Coming up Roses’ has the well-known everything-is-rosy meaning but other meanings: it could evoke the flash of blood that shoots into the s
yringe when someone shoot up on heroin, or it could be a variation on the expression ‘pushing up daisies’ since he wants ‘to burry’ his love, and later says ‘you’re buried below’. The death allusion does not stop there as there is some sort of confusion between the moon and a cell, the moon is ‘a sickle cell’ that ‘will kill you in time’ (sickle cell anemia is a blood disease affecting the red blood cells), and later ‘the moon does its division’ and ‘you’re buried below’ just as tumor cells, which divide fast, will kill you.
yringe when someone shoot up on heroin, or it could be a variation on the expression ‘pushing up daisies’ since he wants ‘to burry’ his love, and later says ‘you’re buried below’. The death allusion does not stop there as there is some sort of confusion between the moon and a cell, the moon is ‘a sickle cell’ that ‘will kill you in time’ (sickle cell anemia is a blood disease affecting the red blood cells), and later ‘the moon does its division’ and ‘you’re buried below’ just as tumor cells, which divide fast, will kill you.
So where do you go from there? May be it’s all related to the pain you hide inside you, like a vicious disease ‘that nobody knows’ about, but that will kill you.
7. Satellite: The beautiful melody line and the slow delivery of the mysterious lyrics make the song floats like some of the previous ones (i.e. ‘Clementine’). The celestial imagery of the song (moon, satellite) expressed loneliness, disconnection, as the satellite, like Elliott, is ‘a lover’s moon’, that stays up all night in a ‘burned out world’.
8. Alphabet Town: With a rare use of harmonica, this song, by its melodic structure, seems to have been written at the same time than some songs of ‘Roman Candle’. Alphabet town is obviously a reference to a part of Portland (or NYC), where all the streets are named with a single letter, a whole city in itself. All the drug imagery of the song could describe a relationship with the wrong person ‘She probably won’t say you’re wrong/But you’re already wrong’, ‘And you threw up whatever she shot down’, ‘Her hand on your arm’. The female character is like a bad temptation, having even an ambiguous name, Constantina (Tina is a nickname for amphetamines), one more way to see a person like a bad addiction.
9. St. Ides Heaven: With a beautifully heavy and haunting melody, this song could be about some dangerous errand, ‘I’ve been out haunting the neighborhood/And everybody can see I’m no good’, and a profound rejection of everyone else: ‘Because everyone is a fucking pro/And they all got answers from trouble they’ve known/And they all got to say what you should and shouldn’t do/Though they don’t have a clue’.
The title is the name of a cheap liquor, which is one more time a religion allusion, linking in one term, addiction, religious childhood, and demons. The imagery of the moon, omnipresent in this album, is again associated with a light bulb like in ‘Coming up roses’, a bulb which is as stubborn as Elliott is because it ‘won’t come down for anyone’.
10. Good To Go: With a slow beginning and a sudden precipitated delivery for the self-deprecating lines ‘I wouldn’t need a hero if I wasn’t such a zero’, this song could describe the sad aftermath of a relationship, and the impossible task to let it go: ‘All I ever see around here/Is things of hers that you left lying around’, a line a little similar to another one from ‘Everything reminds me of her’ of his ‘Figure 8’ album, and confusingly using ‘you’, so that we are not sure anymore whom he is talking about.
11. The White Lady Loves You More: With a sad and melancholic melody and a title which makes once again reference to a drug addiction and a holy figure at the same time, the song has a solemn delivery and anguished lyrics: ‘You wake up in the middle of the night/From a dream you won’t remember/Flashing on like a cop’s light’. It is another song describing an addictive relationship which first mentions a woman (the white lady) who seems to be a drug (the white lady is a nickname for heroin or another drug) and which is in fact a real relationship with a woman, since drugs are only metaphors.
12. The Biggest Lie: The almost upbeat tune brings even more confusion to a song which already has some enigmatic lyrics. A fake relationship ending with a killing line ‘and everything that you do makes me want to die’ which could be a refusal of love, an admittance that pain and depression are safer than love, but an afterward realization that he is telling himself a lie. ‘I just told the biggest lie’.
The images in the song are much more real than in the other songs with ‘The subway that only goes one way’, and ‘a crushed credit card registered to Smith/ Not the name that you call me with’. And this last line could lead to think he is not talking about a relationship with a girlfriend but with his mother who may still call him with his real name.