How can I avoid sounding totally slavish when I'm writing about my favorite song?
We have reached the mountaintop of this list. Everything else slopes away from this song, sublime for sure but assuredly breathtaking valleys in every direction.
You can disagree. You are wrong.
Elliott Smith was not a folk singer-songwriter. He was a minimalist, and that is a colossal difference. His first two albums almost completely consisted of guitar/voice arrangements with only the sparest of extra instrumentation. But even for guitar/voice combos, Elliot Smith's style was contracted, with a whispered, slithery voice and a guitar he preferred to only strike a few strings at a time, forming spindly, highly unique chord structure webs. He had no reliance on folk or roots concepts; theoretically his music was militantly modern.
For his third album, Either/Or, he began adding drums and other traditional rock instruments to a handful of songs, with some decent results, though in some cases the drums seem overt, even a bit conventional. Between his third and fourth albums, his song "Miss Misery" was nominated for an Oscar as part of the Good Will Hunting soundtrack; it was a shock, fleeting brush with wider fame. He personally performed the song on the 1998 Oscars, painfully shy in the spotlight.
To capitalize on this leap in profile, his fourth album benefitted from a noticeably bigger budget. The instrumentation continued to expand, the production was better, and he had clearly given much more thought to how these new instruments would belong in the mix but also allow the airy space that defined his minimal sound. Minimalism is a work-intensive aesthetic, hellbent on removing every last sign of being work-intensive. The result must be exquisite.
"Exquisite"
- Of particular refinement or elegance, as taste, manners, etc., or persons.
- Carefully sought out, chosen, ascertained, devised, etc.
As with all his bigger production albums, on that fourth album (XO), there are victories and failures. But the victories are fantastic; one of them is the greatest victory - "Independence Day."
In the opening guitar passage alone, the song moves through ten chord changes (Cm9th, Dm13th, C, Bb6th, G#, C, Fadd9, G, G#, C). He is not filling a quota. This many chord changes are necessary and logical because the melody minutely weaved into the finger picking is devised to accommodate all these transitions and audacious cadences.
A drum set, bass, and keyboard enter. But all have restrained voicing, fitting in with the gossamer guitar as new threads, avoiding "rock" full saturation.
The three transition chords into the verse are dissonant but also modulate the song with a baroque confidence. The verses emerge from this oddest of cadences and chart an even more ambitious course. The verse vocal melody is a long, unbroken idea skipping and soaring through almost tortured leaps in chord arrangement, a high wire act of orchestrated tension before eventually allowing a merciful resolution.
The reward is a return to the intro guitar pattern, this time with a hypnotic, catchy, sleek vocal harmony. No lyrics, just "Aah."
The verse progression returns with an added voice harmony, there is a short break for a second chorus, but after only one measure of it, we launch into the middle bridge.
The heights attained in this middle bridge are so sweet, honest, pure, vulnerable, and correct. The bass finally hits a low register to underscore the import. The vocal line is so intensely beautiful, emphatically repeating its melody ideas over shifting chord fingerings. The chords do not repeat; it is a one-time shot through a sequence of unexpected, inspired choices, just like the verses are, just as is a life.
"You only live a day," sings Elliott Smith, who is dead.
The song isn't over. It hasn't even peaked. IT HASN'T EVEN PEAKED!
The intro/chorus progression returns, but the song doesn't just snap back into it. The level of transition out of the middle bridge is elite-order composition. The final bridge line peels off into a descending set of transition chords that eventually bring us to the familiar opening guitar melody. But even then we're not done with the transition. The frequency-smashing three-chord cadence that rings out here is one of my favorite sequences of sounds.
The intro/chorus progression gains a counterpoint double vocal in unison octaves - a low and high register singing the same thing. Elliott Smith, the minimalist, doesn't really do triumphant, but this is as close as he'll fly to that sun. The high register voice, especially, sears.
The ending line is uttered in defiant, fiery repetition: "Independence day."
That was a good day.
The song is just three minutes long, non-stop with ideas, care, strangeness, and edifying peace.