I had a radio show at two in the morning and I was supposed to play jazz, but instead I played Elliott and Jeff and Chet Baker, an even sadder, prettier addict with a trumpet, the only one of my sad boys who actually qualified as jazz. Some of my friends mocked me for being so devoted to Elliott and to the other mopes I listened to, like Jeff Buckley, another beauty, already dead. I’m not sure what they knew that I didn’t-maybe that college was supposed to be better than high school or that it was less fun to be cripplingly self-conscious than not. All around me, people were making friends they’d keep for life, meeting their life partners. Sometimes I forget this, the giddy gleefulness of my classmates, but Facebook is good at reminding me.

I hear Elliott’s voice singing to me through my headphones as I walk across campus to the library, to class, to a bench where I sit and smoke with anyone who happens along, rarely sure if we are actually friends or not.Įveryone I went to college with had a wonderful time. I hear the beer bottles in the garbage can the day after a party. I hear the stoplights swinging in the wind.

I hear my beautiful alcoholic roommate having angry, drunk sex with her boyfriend on the other side of the wall that divided our room. Listening now, I hear Ohio, brown and gray most months of the year. Even the record cover-Elliott smoking, a dirty mirror behind his head, Ferdinand tattoo on his arm-looks the way I felt then, a little bit out of focus and grimy. Elliott’s demons had sharper teeth than mine, but I felt like I could see my own sadness reflected in his. Like all best friends, Elliott and I had things in common: drinking problems, uneven love lives. It was street-level misery, whispered and simple. Blige’s What’s the 411-but all of a sudden, my sadness was so great that I only could have loved Either/Or more if it had literally been covered with dirt.

I didn’t know anything about lo-fi music-everything else I’d ever truly loved was glossy and studio perfect: Madonna’s Immaculate Collection and Mary J. I was a freshman at Oberlin, making myself depressing mixtapes to match my mood, and there was nothing that matched my mood better than Either/Or. Here, Emma Straub revisits Elliott Smith ’s album Either/Or.įor a little while, starting around 1998, Elliott Smith and I were the best of friends. Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago.

Elliott smith either or cd