Larry Crane

Nothing can crush you like listening to a posthumous release. To some degree, unearthing a body of song can be likened to exhuming a corpse, the line between respectful analysis and grave robbing incredibly thin. Should it be left alone, or is there something we need to learn from the painful and painstaking process? In the case of New Moon, a two disc album chronicling unreleased songs and rarities from the time of Elliott Smith’s self-titled and Either/Or albums, there is something to learn besides the fact that the prolific singer/songwriter didn’t leave songs off of albums for lack of quality. In part these songs help paint a more complete picture of a painfully shy young man battling his personal demons, before success compounded his problems.
    Friend and engineer Larry Crane, founder/editor of TapeOp Magazine, who with Smith founded Jackpot! Studios in Portland, OR, was assigned the monumental task of tracking down Elliott’s unreleased material, cataloging it, mixing the tracks and curating New Moon. Synthesis spoke with Crane about his history with Elliott, and why the songs on New Moon should be heard.

When did you first meet Elliott and when did you start working together?
Um…’96 in the summer or something. He was kinda shy, you know. I probably met him through Joanna Bolme [Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks / The Minders]—I remember him being at a party in our backyard one time and asking to see my home studio, Laundry Rules. His mixing board or something was broken and he wanted to track some vocals on a song so he just came over one day and knocked out vocals on “Pictures of Me” on the Either/Or album.

What exactly is your role with New Moon? Could you explain what you worked on with this project?
Early on I was contacted by the label, Kill Rock Stars, by Maggie Vail, and she asked if I had any [unreleased material] and I gave her some copies of stuff I had. Then I bumped into her at a show and she said Elliott’s family would maybe like me to work on this project. I called his father and said that would be great, but really someone needs to go through and back things up to digital and start cataloging this. But the first job was to do New Moon, to find the older tapes and mixes and sort through that. There’s a definite timeline through the recording contracts and things, we could only pick through a certain timeframe…
    [New Moon] kinda revolves around a certain series of half-inch 8-track tapes that the self-titled and Either/Or records were also culled from. I made a collection of all the rough mixes of songs that weren’t [on those records] and we decided what would probably work together. The main reason to not put something on the record was usually like a fidelity issue or if it was something that had already been released in another form—if the same song had already been on another album and it’s just a slightly different take. I felt that’s not really necessary; the good version’s already out.

With a couple exceptions I see.
Which ones?

Well, [the alternate version of] “Miss Misery” for instance…
Well that was never on a proper album of his. The alternate take of “Miss Misery” is a beautiful stopping point… We rerecorded “Miss Misery” on 16-track and that is the version that kinda changed his career. It really was a change from there on. We stopped at the demo that he’d snuck in and recorded which I didn’t know existed [laughs], before he recorded the actual version that was used in Goodwill Hunting. No B-sides, there’s only a couple of previously released songs that were on compilations because two of those are completely out of print and were really low runs, and the other one just fit right in—it was the same timeframe and everything and it was a Kill Rock Stars compilation too, so there was no question of licensing.

So why do you think it’s important to release this material to everyone? Certainly a lot of this has been available to all the crazy collector fans.
Yeah but it sounded terrible! Partly it was a sonic thing: if someone wanted to listen to this stuff let’s give them better quality copy. And he was so prolific. The thing was, when he was making Either/Or he had three times as many songs to choose from than what he put on there. They’re all pretty damn good, you know. At the worst they’re interesting [laughs], at their best they’re as good as his best stuff. I wasn’t involved in the initial process of whether this should exist or not so it’s kinda hard for me to say what was going through people’s minds. Everyone knows there was a lot more material recorded than released during his career. I think the estate feels like it’s okay to let people hear it.

Did you have any reservations about releasing material that he decided, for one reason or another, not to widely release himself?
No. I think in a case like Elliott his songwriting is so strong that his leftovers like this are better than some people’s best material. I think it wasn’t like he didn’t put these on a record because they sucked, it was just that he was trying to make a good 12-song record, so he would pick the songs that worked together for that album. I mean, when you got songs like “Going Nowhere,” “Go By” and “Angel in the Snow,” those are not weak songs. There’s a lot of really strong material on this record. It’s a different selection than Either/Or or the self-titled album, and it’s not like a focused album the way that those are, but it’s definitely a collection of great music that, when you put it together with all those records, it really gives you a complete idea of all the different things that were going through his mind, and different writing styles. It kinda completes something in a way, so I think that makes it pretty valid.

As someone who was friends with Elliott and had worked with him professionally, did you have any emotional difficulty in peeling through all his old material?
Um, it was kinda draining to a degree. It wasn’t hip hip hooray everyday. But the mixing was so much work to do that I kinda just got down to work and did it. It’s probably even harder to do interviews, to be honest. I’ve thought about his death for three years now and it really bums me out, but I don’t think about it everyday. But when you have to talk to people everyday on the phone…[laughs], you start thinking about it. Personally, I’m kinda pragmatic and I just get to work, and I think the music is so special and he was such a special person that, you know, that kinda transcends it a little bit for me. I am sad that he’s not with us, but I’m glad that the music’s there and that I can help at all. I feel pretty good.

Why do you feel that New Moon is an appropriate title for this collection?
New moon is when there’s no moon in the sky, so it does kinda sound positive and uplifting, and then when you think about it it’s about absence. His father picked the name, and then I found a quote that’s in the liner notes where Elliott talks about the moon as an image in songs and walking around at night writing songs in his head—seeing the moon, using that image in songs and then trying to make something new. You can take clichéd words and images but kinda make something new with them, and that quote’s just an amazingly perfect quote for that. So it all kinda tied together, we felt it was a good one. Someone said it should have been called “No Name” ‘cause he’s got all these songs called “No Name,” but that seems kinda trite [laughs]. Sounds just kinda negative, kind of a “no” instead of a little more creative way to see an absence. I think it’s a good title, I think they did a great job with that.

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