In her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Brownstein recalls that when she and Tucker wrote songs together, “Corin could make the mess and I could figure out what it meant and what significance it held.” Weiss’ percussion brought Tucker’s heart and Brownstein’s brain together in a single body flinging itself, at full force, against the limitations of our flawed world. But when Janet Weiss joined the trio before they recorded their third album, Dig Me Out, she turned out to be the ingredient no one realized Sleater-Kinney was missing. Adding a virtuoso drummer to a band that already united the Olympia riot grrrl scene’s strongest singer, Corin Tucker, with its most accomplished guitarist, Carrie Brownstein, would’ve seemed like overkill. –Jayson GreeneĪfter Sleater-Kinney released their excellent second album, Call the Doctor, it hardly seemed like any part of their sound needed work. In these shows, by all accounts, you could hear a penny drop Smith was at his most incandescent. “Say Yes” is a feeble, embarrassed sunbeam of an almost-love ballad, one he would bashfully play live amid many shouted requests. On “Between the Bars,” Smith wrote one of his first real standards, a song so potent, bare, and tightly packed-a metaphor about love and addiction that never once tips its hand-that cover artists will be dipping into its well water for decades to come. Here, he raised his voice from a whisper to something just slightly braver: On “Ballad of Big Nothing,” the chord progression curdles from major to minor like a recurring stomach cramp while he sings about doing “whatever you want to, whenever you want to” with the quavery conviction of a punch thrown with a clammy fist. His finger-picking was so delicate that his little Le Domino acoustic guitar became harp-like-try replicating even the first few chord changes of “Angeles,” and immediately grasp how deep and kaleidoscopic his understanding of the instrument was. On Either/Or, that something became the beginning of Elliott Smith’s Big Nothing, the flowering of his songwriting genius and the first real statement to his hometown of Portland and beyond that he might not just be good, but brilliant like few in his generation. By 1995, he had graduated to his friend Leslie’s house the resulting self-titled album sold zilch and got picked up by almost zero college radio stations–but Fugazi heard it, and so did John Doe, who brought this agonizingly shy kid on tour.

Elliott Smith recorded most of his debut album, Roman Candle, in a dilapidated basement, pressing his guitar strings to a tape recorder.

Elliott smith either or reissue indie