Alyson Camus asks the questions we might if we could sit down and speak with Elliott Smith:
Are your favorite songs the ones which surprised you the most when you wrote them? The ones that seemed like failures at the time but were in fact happy accidents and came together in one day?
Are you writing songs like a waiting game? I mean are you blindly playing the game hoping that the more you play, the more you will happen upon something that seems surprising?
When you don’t know what the lyrics mean anymore, do you occasionally want not to print the lyrics for some songs as it happened for ‘cupid’s trick’?
Since people take drugs because they want to feel differently, are you talking about drugs, not because it is interesting to write about drugs in themselves, but because the reasons why people are taking them is a very interesting subject?
Did you use hard drug imagery to paint the portrait of the fight between what people like about themselves and what they want to get away from?
When you used drugs as metaphors and were not involved with them, did you use them as a device to talk about other things you could not name?
Since you don’t write really straight songs about a particular person or event, do you think that metaphors work a lot better when you don’t draw attention to the fact that they are metaphors?
You had a bad time for a while, so do you think a lot of people try to get mileage out of your ‘tortured artist’ image?
Are your lyrics more about feelings than story telling?
Is your inspiration for a song a feeling, a description of a dream you are having when you are awake?
Since your songs evoke strong visuals do you think in pictures? Are you describing a bunch of pictures in your head when you are writing?
Do you think there has to be a certain amount of darkness in songs for the happiness to matter?
Are your songs about what may be interesting about your situation rather than about your specific life?
Did you feel weird when you sang the Beatles’ “Because’ as you don’t see the point in covering a Beatles song other than you didn’t want someone else to do it?
Have you for a long time excluded ‘Miss Misery’ from your set list of concerts because you felt it was associated with the academy awards and was attached to too much baggage?
Since you have the habit of repeating phrases or only changing them a little from one song to another, do you think it helps build themes within your body of work? Or do you think it is a way to make it familiar by coming back to some image?
Since you don’t make up the kind of stuff that is going to be selling billions of records, do you feel like you are not really succeeding and always going to be failing?
You like to write in bars, and you like to have noise as background, so do you think it is hard to write just sitting around in a quiet room, where there is no distractions because you are too aware of what you’re doing?
Since you really like music and the sound of things and you also love words, do you hate when you have to compromise some lyrics because you value more the way something sounds?
Is your favorite song the newest one, since you have not heard it as many times as some of the others?
Since you never read reviews, are you afraid it might interfere with your songwriting?
Are you doing this because you think that anything creative you can do is definitely worth doing?