Elliott Smith, a singer-songwriter whose musically seductive, emotionally dark recordings made him one of the most acclaimed cult artists of the past decade -- and an unlikely Oscar contender in 1998 -- died Tuesday.
Smith, 34, was discovered in his Echo Park apartment with a self-inflicted knife wound and died at County-USC Medical Center, according to the Los Angeles County coroner's office.
In a series of albums beginning in 1994, Smith established himself as an evocative poet of the tormented soul, pairing scenarios of romantic loss, existential bleakness and the curse of addiction with engaging, lilting melodies. His spare guitar accompaniment and the eerie, echo-like quality of his vocals reinforced the music's bittersweet mood.
Record label -- An obituary of singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, which appeared in Thursday's California section, indicated that the Kill Rock Stars record label is located in Seattle. It is located in Olympia, Wash.
Though his record sales were modest, Smith enjoyed tremendous respect from his peers and from critics, emerging as his generation's preeminent exponent of the singer-songwriter tradition.
Though he was stereotyped as a gloomy, introspective artist, Smith had broader aims.
"I don't really have any goals as a songwriter, other than to show what it's like to be a person -- just like everybody else who's ever played music does," Smith said in a 1998 Los Angeles Times interview. "I don't feel like my songs are particularly fragile or revealing.
"They're songs. It's not like a diary, and they're not intended to be any sort of super intimate confessional singer-songwriterish thing. I like the Beatles. Dylan. The Saints and the Clash. All the good things about what they did or do is probably the same things that I'm trying to do."
Friends and colleagues agreed Wednesday that there was more to Smith -- who had been nearing completion of a new album when he died -- than his image as a downbeat troubadour
"He was incredibly funny and sweet, intellectually rigorous, someone who really cared about the people around him," said Luke Wood, an executive at DreamWorks Records who had worked with Smith for five years. "I really felt he was in a very positive, forward-thinking place. He really wanted to get his record out early next year."
Rob Schnapf, who co-produced his last two albums, said Smith "was a dignified, gentle person and a great artist. I loved making records with him," he said. "It was extremely rewarding and we had fun."
But the demons Smith wrote about weren't fictional.
"All that stuff is real," Schnapf said. "That was no game, that was not a marketing idea. That was real stuff."
