Another nice find from my slew of recent downloads: Elliott Smith.
*Note: This blog has posted about Elliot Smith before but "A" has not posted about him*
Elliott Smith started releasing albums in the early '90s up through the early 2000s (until his unfortunately early death in 2003 when he was 34-an apparent suicide), but he started composing and writing music when he was just a teenager. In true indie style, he started playing around with four-track recording, played in a couple bands, and first started releasing albums on an independent label until getting signed in '97.
Smith said one of his biggest influences was Bob Dylan, which you can definitely hear in the bluesy guitar and harmonica, but if you ask me, his music is also really reminiscent of Simon and Garfunkel, especially in the vocal style. It has just the right amount of hushed crooning and gentle harmony, although it's a little darker in terms of lyrics, which deal with a lot of Smith's personal issues, including his alcoholism, depression, and drug addiction.
It's definitely worth your time to listen through snippets from each of his albums and hear the way his music evolved, incorporating more and newer textures of sound and gaining even more melancholy complexity as the years went by. For now, here's "Condor Ave.," which he purportedly wrote when he was only 17 and then recorded for his first album, Roman Candle, released 1994.
"Condor Ave." by Elliott Smith from Roman Candle (1994)
"El Condor Pasa" by Simon and Garfunkel from Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970)
(I just couldn't pass up the parallelism.)
-A
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