It is always a strange feeling for me to listen to a new Elliott Smith’s song. When he died I thought there would never be another new song but they keep showing up, at the most unexpected moment,… who would have thought that a completely original song would surface almost 8 years after his death?
A rough mix of the ‘The Real Estate’ was posted on Pitchfork last Friday, whereas a more finished version of the song will be featured on ‘Live From Nowhere Near You volume II’, the 3-disk charity compilation benefiting the organization Outside In, put together by Kevin Moyer.
This is what estate archivist Larry Crane wrote about it on the Elliott Smith’s board:
‘The Real Estate’ is on ‘Menagerie’, a Stranger Than Fiction cassette released and recorded in 1987. It was the band's 4th cassette as far as I can tell. It is not on that reel in the photo. The ‘Untitled’ song on that reel (and it's a 2" reel, not a 1/2") is an instrumental reduction mix with overdubs but no vocal of ‘Abused’. Elliott's version of ‘The Real Estate’ was recorded in 1995/96 across several reels. He recorded part of the instrumental backing on a first reel and vocals/electric guitar/toms/solo on a second reel. The other songs on these reels include released versions of ‘No Name #5’, ‘Rose Parade’, ‘2:45 AM’, ‘The Enemy Is You’, ‘Almost Over’, ‘Looking Over My Shoulder’. My guess would be this was recorded in 1996. It took me a long time to figure out that this ‘Untitled’ song existed on the multitracks when I was working on ‘New Moon’. Things became more clear as I started the ‘real" archive work later. But this song seemed so ‘on its own’ on these reels that it didn't really make sense until I heard the STF version – ‘Oh, that's where it came from.’
Stranger than Fiction was the first band Elliott participated in, when he was still in high school, so it is really an early work, although he recorded it many years later, may be because he liked it! On the Pitchfork website, Kevin Moyer explained he went to school with Elliott in Portland and tried later to reconnect with him and ask him to contribute to the volume I of his charity compilation. It never happened, but while working on the second volume, Larry Crane and he found this mystery track nobody knew about it. They first called it ‘Untitled (Mailman Thinks Me Dumb)’, according to some lyrics in the song, but Crane found this cassette he is talking about, and recognized the song as ‘The Real Estate’ co-written with Elliott’s friend Garrick Duckler.
Elliott plays all the instruments on the track, and the melody is not so far away from some of his later work figuring on ‘New Moon’, or even on Heatmiser’s albums, with an unusual pretty crazy guitar solo. You can even listen to it on YouTube now: