Nobody wants to get drunk and get loud

For years, my friend Yael has been sending me Elliott Smith B-sides, live recordings, unknown albums, unreleased material, early demo versions, covers used on movie soundtracks, videos of Elliott Smith burping, speculative fan fiction regarding Elliott Smith's secret lives, news of Elliott Smith ghost sightings at the Figure 8 mural. Now, I'm as big an Elliott Smith fan as any run-of-the-mill, three-hanky homebody--that is, vaguely obsessed with the man's music. But no one beats Yael when it comes to Omaha-bred songwriters.

I was unsure what to expect from the Hank Williams Jr. cover on the Elliott Smith: Live At Largo EP she implored me to listen to. True, Smith's strangely honeyed version of Cat Stevens' "Trouble" hit my play-count like a concert hall afire a few years back, but there were simply too many factors to be able to attribute to his work, specifically, all the accolades deserved by the final product. Don't get me wrong: both versions are incredible, and Elliott Smith's has a quality undeniably his own. But covers are hard to pin down, and the association game has myriad alleyways, all seemingly leading to sin.

Maybe it's the invitation that starts out this version of Hank Williams "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down" ("You wanna hear a country song?") or the laugh that the notoriously dour Smith giggles out before beginning to strum. Or perhaps it's that, throughout the performance, he's clearly having a good time, continuing to smirk and smile, twist and transform an old country-man's classic into a modern miracle of maniacal proportions. It's an Elliott Smith performance that you wish you could have witnessed. When he forgets words and stops to hum them out in his haunted falsetto you want to give him the cue. And when, in the last line, his voice cracks and his rowdy friends have all settled down around and everyone forgives him anyway, you want to forgive him, too. "Oh, Elliott," you'd say, "why'd you ever stop celebrating?"

For a long while I've attempted to figure out what the hell it is about Elliott Smith, and I think I see some light under the door here. Hank Williams was a cowboy in spirit: blues-ed out, bogged down, broken up. Straight up melancholy meant straight up bourbon. And Williams can sing, "I think I know what my father meant when he sang about a lost highway" because he's Hank Williams Jr. and that's how it is when there are words to describe who you are and what it is that you do.

But Elliott Smith is not a junior anybody and his music both is and is not some kind of country. The references in the song aren't his references. He, like us, does not actually know Kriss Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, or Jesse Colter. But the sentiment is left and how--like a quotient's quiet remainder for which nobody quite calculated. Smith is an active and lugubrious memory for the present, and he knows what's gone was already gone but we sing about it anyway like it's leaving right now. When you listen to "All My Rowdy Friends," you can feel him breathing an old country-man's lament into a modern man's dress uniform and it fits right; it goes down an elixir brewed by the best. Melancholy, after all, is complicated. It's not an easy act. And Smith's celebration of that act of ill-ease--his tribute to it--well, that's worth listening to.

"The hangovers hurt more than they used to," Smith sings, "and none of us seem to do things quite like we used to do." In the new year, hangovers do hurt and nothing feels quite the same--except for everything. I've listened to this song probably thirty times today as I nurse in the new year, and as far as I'm concerned there's nothing else I could have done.

Listen: YouTube video of the audio

This is nothing like it was:

Perhaps it's that a malaise has set down over the city. Inside the cold-ridden fuselage bodies I pass on the street, an empty hunger imbues unsettled glances; and every mittened, umbrella-holding hand screams and seeks a match for the coming night. There is nothing to bite into; nothing to grasp; no greatness for which we can merely reach - the reaching itself somehow a question. No answers. We traipse around these bitten streets hoping for a turn somewhere to shave some semblance of a loss from our down-turned corners and unadorned visages. These are the kinds of days when streetlamps blink off unexpectedly as you pass under them, so many ha-ha jokes from so many supposed urban givens. And when phone calls come in fiery droves - each one pleading more than the one before for a part of you, for pieces we're never quite sure we ever quite had. You are not enough from rolling spirits around the country. This is when the next moment is scarier than the last. Still you have fought and forged a future, but nothing ever gets left out that you want to leave out; nothing you want to include is ever enough included. The parts of you are never whole and too many want all of them. Where is there to go but into your headphones?

Around now, I'm left wandering in the ways I know how. "I won't fuck us over" I am telling myself, not-quite-convincing each component section of my mind. "I won't fuck us over" as a mantra or a therapeutic confession. I do not know what this is doing, anymore - only that it's not doing enough. Waking up several hours too late for any forward progress, it's all just a filling of daylight with interaction so the nighttime doesn't flounder into a Navidsonian nightmare. Plotless, the forms and facts are all skewed, each warp and woof a mere house of leaves, sans accolade or vindication.

It's November now. And I don't know what Matt Berninger of The National means when he sings and screams and tears apart the heart of his voice into shreds of not-knowing and needing to say it - if that question of meaning could ever be asked genuinely. It seems somehow unimportant, the desire to solve it as unfounded as the pretension of tracing any lineage from this to that to another point. But the determination of his fucking up - the sheer desire to make it to the next hopeful moment without letting it all go - is here the necessary function of a necessary next. I'm in the mood to punctuate / only with that maker of promises, the colon: Dunn writes in Different Hours. Next, next, next, it says, God bless it. But unlike our dear poet Stephen, Berninger cannot wait around for the typing of soft phrasing - for the algebraic constructions of Dunn's constrained enjambment - instead ejaculating statements of desire in as much of the next-is-now rawness the human voice can produce, spilling the lowest common denominators of What We Can Hope into aural disruption :

I wish that I believed in fate
I wish I didn't sleep so late

So, Mr. November, here we are: and I don't know where. Next, next, next Dunn says. God, I hope so.

The National - Mr November (live in Boston)
(photo courtesy of Rock and Racehorses)