I am not a musician but I listen to music a lot, and for Elliott’s music it was a combination of many things: the delicate harmonies and the mysterious and metaphoric lyrics.
There is also the feeling that his songs were fragile and strong/bold at the same time,. The melodies are very delicate but the words can be very harsh, harsh for him of course but for others too.
So I suppose it was this opposition between the music and the lyrics that interested me at first.
The lyrics are really intelligent and can be understood at so many levels; many people will describe them as depressing, sad, but I never saw that in Elliott’s songs. Yes some songs are not particularly happy, but they are more like a patchwork of different emotions. And his metaphors are always brilliant and intertwined, it is like he was breaking things into a lot of other things, at many levels, to build an emotion.
It may seem pretentious, but his songs are everything but pretentious. They are honest, and honesty is a rare thing in this world.