Tons of people have covered Elliott Smith’s songs, and there are only two ways to do it, either you try to be as close to the original as possible but it’s dangerous since you enter into competition with Elliott and fans may hate you for that, or you make the song your own, and it is also dangerous because you transform the song and fans may hate you for this too. In any case it’s a lose-lose situation. However, many still try as Ben Folds who recently covered ‘Say Yes’ and I have read many fan reactions which were not utterly positive: there is a lack of depth or emotion, his keyboard is too small, his voice sucks… I have to say that his cover is not particularly bad or good but ‘Say Yes’ is a very well loved song and Ben should have known he was attacking a sacred cow:
There are several tribute albums recorded by mostly unknown or very little known artists, like ‘A Tribute To Elliott Smith’ or ‘The String Quart Tribute to Elliott Smith’, or ‘To: Elliott From: Portland’, which I have never really bothered listening to, except for a few tracks from the last one.
The best covers were probably done during the tribute show at the Henry Fonda theater, hold shortly after Elliott Smith’s death (in November 2003) where a lot of artists performed at least one of his songs. Bright Eyes was announced but unfortunately never showed up. The show got sold out pretty fast, and I remember a beautiful rendition of ‘Rose Parade’ by John Doe (X), a very poignant a cappella rendition of ‘I Didn’t Understand’ by Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley, who also played ‘The Biggest Lie’, and an interesting, almost reggae-like version of ‘Waltz #2 (XO)’ by Future Pigeon. The 88 also performed excellent versions of ‘King’s Crossing’, ‘Can’t Make a Sound’ and ‘Stupidity Tries,’ whereas Beth Orton sang a moving ‘No Name #3’ from 1994’s Roman Candle and Lou Barlow did ‘Division Day.’
Towards the end of the show, Beck played no less than three covers ‘Ballad of Big Nothing’, Clementine’ and ‘Alameda’, telling the audience he had been working on them pretty hard during the last days.
The show was supposedly recorded for a live album that would have benefited the Elliott Smith Memorial Fund, but it is a shame it never happened. So if some recordings are floating around on the internet, there are pretty hard to find except the Beck ones which are on youtube:
Beck played these challenging songs really well despite the facts he was obviously a little chocked up and had almost no time to learn them.
Among other interesting covers, I would include ‘Antonio Carlos’, an Heatmiser song by Doug Martsch during a concert, and ‘The biggest lie’ by Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes.
Conor Oberst even recorded the song for his live alum ‘Motion Sickness: Live Recordings’ (2005).
For the fun I also could mention the Sad Kermit’s cover of ‘Needle In The Hay’ mimicking the famous scene of ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’. It’s actually cute, moving and absurd at the same time.
Christopher O’Riley, a classical pianist used to play Ravel and Rachmaninoff, recorded a full album of Elliott Smith’s covers, ‘Home to Oblivion: Elliott Smith Tribute’ with piano arrangements that fans have either found fantastic or embarrassed of too many notes. I personally think Chris put together a brilliant homage to Elliott’s musical abilities.
The jazz pianist Brad Mehldau had already tried himself to a fantastic version of ‘Bottle up and explode’.
But probably the most interesting and beautiful of all covers is the rendition of ‘Between the bars’ by the guitarist and jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux on her 2004 album ‘Careless Love’.
She carefully reinvents the song with her smooth Billie Holiday voice, she precociously rephrases it but nevertheless stays amazingly close to the emotion of the original.