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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Revisiting the Music of Elliott Smith

March 30, 2015 by Scott Timberg

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THE other day I almost froze as I heard a song coming out of the radio that sounded both fresh and eerily familiar. It turned out to be a song from the new Elliott Smith tribute by Seth Avett — guitarist for the rustic, North Carolina-based Avett Brothers — and the indie singer-songwriter Jessica Lea Mayfield.

The song — “Somebody I Used to Know,” a great and mournful break-up song that is here filled out and remade — made me think these songs were more flexible, and less dependent on Elliott’s own story, than I used to think. His first biographer, Ben Nugent, pointed out to me that these songs are not diary entries: They are personal, but also as crafted as something by Dylan or Joni Mitchell.

Some, including some friends of mine, disagree, and think these songs don’t translate, or that they are too tied up in Smith’s untimely death. Hearing Avett and Mayfield just now on KCRW sajlm_07reminded me of how much I love their versions of “Between the Bars,” “Big Nothing,” and so on.

Here is a video of the two playing and talking about the project. They’re at the Wilshire Ebell in LA Tuesday night.

Filed Under: alt-country, elliott smith, indie, Los Angeles

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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