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chudleycannons:

“Some people say that everyone in your dreams is just some version of you. Sure. But it makes as much sense to say your dreams are reconstructions of things people told you, or how things seem to you, and you just internalize these external things. Songs are the same way.”

-Elliott Smith <3

He was a friend of a friend, and one time when I was staying over at her house, Elliott was as well. I was amused to see that he wrote his name on his socks in Sharpie - E. SMITH - just like I did, and for the same reason I did. We had a moment.

I like half-steps a lot and I think about these things constantly. I work it all out in my head. Things like motifs and metaphors, I like those things, but I don’t usually want to make one carry the whole song or have everything point back to that one thing because somehow that makes it seem just kind of small psychically. Sometimes, the initial thing, something in the first verse, some image or something has to kind of to sleep for a while, and then come back later in a changed form or a more direct form, or a more indirect one or something. The way that people usually use metaphor often times is unfortunately deliberate.

It’s the difference between your friend taking a picture of you just to remember that time and someone taking your picture to publish it somewhere. It’s kind of unnerving in a way.

It seems like it would be easy to get locked into a kind of safe mode of, well, maybe if people are looking at me then maybe I’d better not do anything too—like if you walk into a room and feel like people are looking at you, then you don’t want to crack a joke or something or act weird. But then it’s kind of more important to crack a joke. It’s definitely too boring to just do stuff that you know for a fact you can do.

Of course it’s rewarding to see that so many people understand your work and appreciate it but I don’t think it’s because I’m the same. I’m definitely not the same as I was some years ago but I reckon that I’m honest in everything I sing or do and maybe people can feel it…That’s true that I take a particular attention to lyrics without concentrating only on them as they just express what I truly feel about things. And as feelings are something that every human being can share, I can understand that some people feel close to what I express through my music. But I don’t think I give myself away, I’ve still my own secret garden…

…Whats the point of playing a song badly? It’d be better to play it and mean it, than to just walk through it.

Smith wanted to start a family and Chiba did too, [Dorien] Garry recalls. “They definitely wanted to have children. It was something they both talked to me about. In my first year of knowing him, we had a really funny conversation about having kids, because I took care of kids off and on, and he was like, ‘If I have a kid it’ll be the thing that makes me want to kick my ass into shape more than anything else, ever.’ And it was like, ‘Well, yeah, you don’t have a choice, because when you have a kid it’s yours forever,’ and I remember we both laughed and were like, ‘We can’t have kids.’ He wanted to have kids and that was something they were both trying to do. I think that was what a lot of the cleaning up and trying to be healthy was about and I know the last time he spoke to me about just quitting smoking it was kind of like, ‘I’d rather have a baby knowing that I wasn’t smoking while I was having a baby.’ That was a big one.

I’m really glad they like the songs, I get super-attached to other people’s songs, too.
But there’s only so much you can know about someone based on the songs they sing, or a painting they made. You can know a little bit about someone if they tell you about the dream they had last night. You still don’t know what they’re like during the day.

I’m not the most introspective person in the world, but I am used to my internal musical landscape being unpeopled, and for a while there were lots of people camping out in there. It seemed kind of crowded. It wasn’t bad, it was just weird. Now I’m kind of in a place where I feel free to do whatever comes up musically. There’s not as much focus on one bizarre event in my life, like the Oscars were… . So I’m just kind of floating along now, seeing what happens to float up next to me.