![]() He was an ur-hipster-the first musician I noticed wearing greasy trucker’s hats and ironic thrift-store T-shirts as a constant uniform-with an inherent distrust of fame, money, and all-American attitudes, but was gracious enough to defend Céline Dion to any and all because she had been nice to him backstage at the Oscars. ![]() Smith was a Beatlesesque melodic genius who looked like he emptied spent oil pans behind a rural gas station. The Beatles were melodic geniuses and were cute to boot. In the film, Smith’s friend, photographer, and video director Autumn de Wilde recalls being stunned when seeing him for the first time on the cover photo of his third record, Either/Or (1997): “That sweet voice comes out of that intense face?” This was key to Smith’s appeal, his pretty-ugly-but-pretty-enough-for-you Everyman quality. His smile-a transformative crack in his rough-hewn, taciturn face-was reportedly one of the most infectious enticements to joy his friends had ever known. ![]() His searingly literary, harmonically gorgeous songs were populated by junkies, drunks, miserable and misery-inducing women, abusive stepfathers, bad dream fuckers, no confidence men, and inveterate losers who “got in a kind of trouble that nobody knows.”Īs Nickolas Rossi’s reverential, meditative documentary Heaven Adores You is at pains to make clear, however, if you actually knew the songwriter, you thought of him as one of the funniest people you’d ever met, a class clown with a goofy, performative sense of humor, someone who could run a joke so far into the ground that it became hilarious again (and again). As if to confirm Algren’s emotional weather report, the bleak refrain of the last song on Smith’s final studio album, released posthumously, was, “Shine on me, baby, cause it’s raining in my heart.” Those who had followed his solo career, consisting of six uniformly excellent LPs over ten years, would not have been surprised by this last will and testament. “Somehow it was always raining behind the eyes of Oregon girls.” And so it always seemed to be for Elliott Smith, an extraordinarily gifted, peerlessly poignant songwriter and favorite son of Portland, who died in 2003 at age thirty-four of two knife wounds to the chest, an apparent suicide. “BEHIND THE EYES of the Oregon girls it was raining again in Portland,” Nelson Algren wrote in his 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side. ![]() Nickolas Rossi, Heaven Adores You, 2014, digital video, color, sound, 96 minutes. ![]()
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