“I’ve always been fascinated with the drone of open-string guitars, like in Nick Drake’s music or Neil Young’s or Joni Mitchell’s,” says Brad Mehldau, widely considered one of the greatest living jazz pianists, talking about what first attracted him to the music of Elliott Smith.
“I’ve always been fascinated with the drone of open-string guitars, like in Nick Drake’s music or Neil Young’s or Joni Mitchell’s,” says Brad Mehldau, widely considered one of the greatest living jazz pianists, talking about what first attracted him to the music of Elliott Smith.
“But there’s also a very Beatlesy aspect – so many beautiful, finely wrought songs that Elliott wrote on the piano, things like ‘Everything Means Nothing To Me’. He was a very sophisticated harmonist at a time when it wasn’t at the forefront in pop music. There was a lot of cool hip-hop. Grunge was happening. But Elliott came along and, for me, it felt like a renaissance.”
Mehldau first encountered Smith back at the turn of the century, at LA’s Largo nightclub, where producer Jon Brion’s Friday-night residency attracted the city’s smart, sardonic songwriter set, including Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright. You can get a taste of the scene on YouTube in The Jon Brion Show, a never-aired pilot shot in summer 2000 by director Paul Thomas Anderson, featuring Brion, Mehldau and a painfully nervy Smith, shuffling awkwardly between piano, guitars and glockenspiel on a fairy-lit stage.
“We lived in the same neighbourhood, but I couldn’t say we were friends,” Brad remembers. “He was kind of reclusive and kept to himself. We played together maybe a handful of times.” But the music touched Mehldau deeply. Over the years, he has covered Elliott’s songs (notably “Bottle Up And Explode!” in 2013), and recorded a bluesy, bittersweet elegy (“Sky Turning Grey” on 2010’s Highway Rider). Now he’s about to release Ride Into The Sun, a stunning collection of songs written or inspired by Smith.
The album reunites Mehldau with longtime collaborator Chris Thile of Nickel Creek and marks a first collaboration with Daniel Rossen, guitarist in the recently reactivated Grizzly Bear. “Both Elliott and Brad were formative for me in my approach to making music,” reveals Rossen. “In fact, I knew Brad’s music before I knew Elliott’s. I remember hearing his early trio records when I was playing jazz in high school. His playing has a mysterious lyrical quality that feels beyond improvisation.
“I found Elliott Smith later when I was 19-years-old. I was angsty and lost, the perfect audience for his music. But truly, Smith was the first modern singer-songwriter that really hit me on an emotional level. I spent many hours walking around Lower Manhattan smoking meaningful cigarettes and listening to his self-titled album. Elliott could make a solitary acoustic guitar sound so soulful and percussive, even menacing. It gave me a whole new sense of possibility.”
In his sleevenotes for the record, Mehldau acknowledges Smith as a “visionary depressive”, though much of Ride Into The Sun feels like it’s throwing open the windows on his music, bringing fresh light to a songwriter too often painted as a tragic figure. Mehldau’s take on “The White Lady Loves You More”, one of the darkest songs in the Smith songbook, is as lush and lovely as a Gershwin rhapsody.
“You do get a sense with Elliott, like you do with Nick Drake, of a suffering personality,” Mehldau admits. “But there’s also light in there too, and hope. I think what people hear in his music is a kind of perseverance, in spite of suffering, and finding beauty within a sad state. There’s something mysterious about it. Through music you can kind of have a dialogue with somebody who’s not here any more. When I play Brahms’ music, I feel like he’s in the room with me, sitting there smoking a cigar or whatever. It’s the same thing with Elliott.”
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