Elliot Smith: un brano inedito composto all’età di 14 anni

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L’estate scorsa con la pellicola ‘Heaven Adores You’ il regista Nickolas Rossi portò in scena la vita del grandissimo Elliot Smith. Un documentario farcito da filmati d’archivio, e musica inedita.

Recentemente il produttore Kevin Moyer, in un’intervista per Portland Radio Project, ha offerto una porzione di ‘Ocean’, un vero brano inedito che non era presente nella colonna sonora del film. Il pezzo risale al 1984, quando Smith aveva appena 14 anni.

It’s a song I don’t think anyone has ever heard before. … It’s from his Texas days. At the very beginning of the film, we show Texas and his good friend Pickle, Steve Pickering. And it’s basically Elliott when he’s young, before he came to Portland, these guys, they got together and they were playing music for the sake of playing music. They were doing Led Zeppelin songs and covers, stuff like that. I think it was a group: Steve Pickering, Steve Smith (who was Elliott before he changed his name), a girl named Kim and another guy named Kevin and a guy named Mark, I think. Different variations of these kids would get together at Steve Pickering’s house and play music and make music.

Then Elliott moved and he came to Portland, and he wasn’t coming back. He was not going back to Texas. But he would come back to visit, and when they would visit, they would get together and jam. So what started as kids getting together and making music started to turn into actual songwriting, and I think it’s the very start of Elliott writing his own songs.

So this song is something from 1984. Elliott was 14 years old. … It’s interesting because it’s one of the first songs that as they were writing, Elliott would make lyrics for it. It’s keyboards, guitars, and Elliott singing. They did the keyboards and guitars first, and the Elliott came back and Steve Pickering convinced him, for demo purposes, to sing. I don’t think Elliott was a singer at that point, but they kind of pushed him to sing it, and he did. It’s probably one of the first songs that they did that actually has lyrics.

Kevin Moyer

Ascoltatela qui sotto, il pezzo arriva al trentaduesimo minuto.