One day she’ll go/I told you so…
At some point around my fifteenth birthday, I started taking guitar lessons. This was primarily because I intended on studying Music for my Higher School Certificate, and you can’t write compositions without a chordal instrument. Surprisingly, especially given that I have a stub for a left ring finger, the six-string and I got on like a house on fire. As it turns out, the rhythm you get from playing drums can be channeled into the instrument, a point most notably demonstrated by the style of playing exemplified by another (far more talented) drummer/guitarist with the same name as me, Jonathan Boulet. Of course, before I realised that this was a possibility, I wanted to write the acoustic, lazily-strummed chord progression to end all chord progressions. This was an honour held for a very long time by Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’, probably the song that makes everyone want to learn sevenths and stick around the bottom of the fretboard forever. But what struck me when I first discovered Elliot Smith some years later was how he managed to outdo himself on almost every song, not just with the shape of the chords but also his melodies.
‘Talking To Mary’ is not one of Smith’s most famous tunes, but it really speaks to me as the kind of lovelorn ballad I spent so many summer holidays trying to write, locked away in our coastal beach house while everybody else was out in the water. At that time, I was trying to push as many ideas as I could into four chords, darting up and down the fretboard, making shapes that tore my ligaments and practicing until my fingers started to bleed. I wrote songs about girls, lots of them, but none comes close to the simple beauty of this Smith classic. I think the really sad thing is that by the time I really could appreciate Smith, he had passed away. If you listen to the opening salvo of this song, you can hear the entire of his manifesto; the open low strings, the minor shifts, the little tricks in the top strings so that everything seems to be moving exactly in time with his voice. You know someone’s written a neat tune when you don’t know anybody called Mary but you completely understand who the subject is and where she’s coming from. Making the personal universal, that’s a real skill. And it’s something I never quite managed to master in those emo years between 15 and 17.5.
Elliot Smith never oversang. Just as his guitars never needed to be plugged in and supercharged, he let the natural acoustics of his recording booth carry his melodies for him. Sometimes we don’t need partners at all; we just need people like this to fill the void with sad prettiness. There’s a definite vulnerability to Smith that you can hear here, as it turns out that ‘Talking To Mary’ was an unreleased track recorded at the same time of Smith’s first self-titled record for the Kill Rock Stars label back in 1995. This may have been one of the first tunes he ever committed to tape, and that in itself is amazing. The rest of the amazing, well, that’s what we have an inbuilt player for.
Elliot Smith – ‘Talking To Mary’
More Smith family here.
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