A lot has been said about Elliott Smith’s last album, ‘From A Basement On The Hill’, that it was a suicide album, that it was not, that the family had intentionally censored some of the too-obvious-entitled songs, like ‘Suicide machine’ or ‘Abused’, although if you really listen to the lyrics of the songs, you would see it is not about killing yourself at all!
The problem I have with most people is that they never go much deeper than the surface and the appearance of things, they take everything at the first degree and never make the effort to understand things in depth.
One of the songs which features on this last and posthumous album and has been the most categorized as a suicide song, is ‘King’s Crossing’. Sure the song is dark, dramatic and serious, sure it is a struggle between Elliott and record industry (‘The method acting that pays my bills/Keeps the fat man feeding in Beverly Hills’ or ‘The judge is on vinyl, decisions are final’), or an epic battle between Elliott and Elliott (‘It don't matter because I have no sex life/All I want to do now is inject my ex-wife’), or whatever the song means for you, but for god’s sake the song was first played live, with lyrics nearly identical to the album version, in October 1999, so 4 years before he died…. But still people are calling it a suicide note.
The song actually starts with very indistinct spoken lyrics that seem to come from different voices, speaking about ‘brother’, ‘wolfman’, ‘white man’ and ‘hell’, and then continues with some rather bombastic arrangements of piano, vocals and guitar, it’s a furious tempest which builds up a dramatic mood that bursts over and over with angry vocals, calming down at the end.
All the drug references in the song have nothing to do with his own addiction since he was not taking any drugs at that time, many people could confirm this. But the myth will persist forever,… Although Elliott had written this song years ago, he curiously recorded it for good just after he had been through drug hell and unfortunately only a few days before his death. So of course people are drawing hasty conclusions, for these same reasons, they don’t look very far…
There is a figure of writing called metaphor that apparently goes over the head of many people, but that Elliott was using a lot in his lyrics, drug addiction being one of his common metaphors for relationships and other life ‘addictions’.
So yeah ‘inject my ex-wife’, ‘the needles on the tree’, ‘a skinny Santa is bringing something to me’, ‘his speech is slurred’, ‘I’m going on a date with a rich white lady’ are there on purpose to make you think about drugs, but you could find in the song as many references to religious and mythological items than to drugs: ‘Christmas time’, ‘Falling down like an omen’, ‘white lady’, and even ‘King’s crossing’, which has always been mysterious,.. a possible reference to the king of king on the cross? Or to a crossing , a change, could it be the crossing of the river Styx river? After all there is enough death references to imagine something like this.
Elliott was extremely well read and his songs are full of complex literary innuendos, which lose all their magic when they are explained the way I am doing it right now…
Most people take literally the line ‘I can’t prepare for death any more that I already have’… ‘it speaks for itself’ as some say,… oh really? But aren’t we all preparing for death because life is a game, a shell game as Conor Oberst would say, who may have been aware of Smith's lyrics: ‘All you can do now is watch the shells/The game looks easy, that's why it sells’…. Ha, so close to ‘No, I don't want to play/It's a shell game, it's a shell game’, and I could go on with this Bright Eyes’ song as ‘My private life is an inside joke’ could mirror ‘It don't matter because I have no sex life’ in King’s crossing, but I digress…
Sure the song is dark and could be about death, could be about dying, may be dying of not being able to produce the music he wanted, … there are this judge on vinyl and this fat man in Beverly Hills, but the end of the song is a complete U turn with the ‘time reverses’, ‘Dead men talk to all the pretty nurses/Instruments shine on a silver tray’, like a light at the end of the tunnel, like a survivor on a hospital bed after a long battle.
It is just really bizarre that Elliott’s life became the fulfillment of his own myth,… it just does not help his after-life.