Elliott Smith Rarities Archive – The Moon is a Sickle Cell [2023]

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The Moon is a Sickle Cell has been updated for the 20th anniversary of Elliott's passing. This update adds the leaks and releases from earlier this year of his work before his solo career. This includes Stranger Than Fiction, Harum Scarum, A Murder of Crows, and Heatmiser. 

The hope for this project from the start was to preserve Elliott's unreleased work in the best quality possible. There are so many songs that Elliott wrote and recorded that are excellent, but haven't been released. To really explain this, within this archive is a "best of the archive" collection that has 80 tracks that never made it to an album. 

Elliott's influence on other songwriters has been immense. He seems to always pop up in conversations with musical creatives and he's kind of become a ubiquitous reference, especially in the studio. His music doesn't have the same kind of backing that an artist owned by a major label would, so I think that's why he always seems like he's just on the periphery. 

I like that he's music's best kept secret and I'm glad to be a part of the fan community. I've enjoyed seeing how his music has been kept alive through various projects and shares. Still, there's always a chance that some of his music could be lost to time. I'm still dying to hear a good quality studio version of "Stained Glass Eyes" or "Flowers for Charlie" or "You Make It Seem Like Nothing" or "Abused."

A lot of these tracks have never seen any kind of official release or master by a professional audio engineer who could replicate Elliott's production style. Elliott's talent wasn't only his songcraft, but also his audio production skills. This can be seen in the difference between songs mixed by Larry Crane and songs mixed by Fritz Michaud, which the community tends to think is more in line with what Elliott would have wanted. That kind of mastering can only be achieved with access to the original recordings for the individual instrument and vocal parts.

Fingers crossed that we'll see the official release of some of these tracks next year for the 20th anniversary of From a Basement on the Hill. And fingers crossed that the audio production will sound like something Elliott would have been happy with.

This will probably be the last update ever to the archive. So it can serve as a snapshot of things up until 2023.

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Elliott Smith - From a White Basement on the Hill

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Download the complete archive of rarities here - The Moon is a Sickle Cell

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Elliott Smith's last album, From a Basement on the Hill, wasn't finished before he died in 2003. What was released in 2004 was an album that had been mixed by Rob Schnapf and supervised by Joanna Bolme. The album wasn't the vision that Elliott had for it, and it couldn't be, because a lot of the recording was left unfinished. 

The bit of controversy that surrounds the posthumous album's creation is that the main producer that Elliott was working with to record the album, David McConnell, wasn't consulted. He supposedly has 3 years worth of handwritten notes by Elliott about the direction he wanted to take the album. 

This lead to things like the song "Ostriches and Chirping" being included in the final product, which wasn't anything that Elliott had ever touched, but a little experiment that McConnell had created himself. Also, Elliott apparently didn't intend for the song "Pretty (Ugly Before)" to be on the album either.

Elliott had wanted From a Basement on the Hill to be a double album, and was inspired by The Beatles  White Album. That's why this mix is called From a White Basement on the Hill.

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Elliott Smith - "Best of" The Moon is a Sickle Cell Collection

This collection is a "best of the archive" compilation. It contains ONLY one version of each solo rarity track. The track is either the best quality version or the most well known version of the track. There are 80 songs in total, so it’s like an 80 track rarities album. 

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Elliott Smith - Fritz Michaud's New Moon (Comp of All Fritz Michaud Mixes)

Before his death, Elliott Smith asked Fritz Michaud to master a lot of his rarities. The album New Moon album was released in 2007, and audio engineer Larry Crane was chosen to remix a lot of the same tracks for its release. Many fans consider the Fritz mixes to be better and more in line with Elliott’s style. This compilation collects all of the mixes by Fritz Michaud that are available. 

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Elliott Smith - Thirteen (Best Live Covers Comp)

This is a more condensed version of Part 9 of the archive. 

"Part 1 (Best Quality)" is a collection of all of the highest quality live versions of cover songs that are available. 

"Part 2 (Low Quality)" is a collection of all the lower quality cover songs, but the best quality tracks available. 

There is at least one track of each cover song Elliott played live that was recorded. 
  

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Elliott Smith - Smile at Confusion (Live Rarities Comp)

One of the earliest collections of any Elliott Smith material was called Confusion and it was a bunch of live versions of unreleased and off album songs. This compilation reimagines that collection by incorporating songs from all of the new live sources that have been collected over the years. The title Smile at Confusion comes from the song “Dancing on the Highway.”
 

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Nirvana :: Better Nevermind (Well...Whatever Version) & Better In Utero (1993 Steve Albini Mixes)

Nirvana :: Nevermind...Well, Whatever Version

1. Smells Like Teen Spirit        (Live on Top of the Pops - 28 November 1991)
2. In Bloom                              (Smart Mix)
3. Come As You Are                (Devonshire Mix)
4. Breed                                    (Devonshire Mix)
5. Lithium                                 (Smart Mix)
6. Polly                                     (Smart Mix)
7. Territorial Pissings               (Devonshire Mix)
8. Drain You                             (BBC John Peel Session)
9. Lounge Act                           (Devonshire Mix)
10. Pay to Play                         (Stray Away Original Version - Smart Mix)
11. On a Plain                           (Devonshire Mix)
12. Something in the Way        (Devonshire Mix)
13. Endless, Nameless             (BBC John Peel Session)

 

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30 years of Nevermind, and they are still finding ways to make it sound worse. This year's Super Deluxe 30th anniversary reissue gets yet another reslickening and glossifying in the remastering laboratories for optimal consumer enjoyment. Take a scroll through Spotify and you'll see that there are way more versions of Nirvana albums than there needs to be. But there's an interesting story as to why this is the case and why mixing actually matters.

 

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Nirvana :: I Hate Myself and I Want to Die

Nirvana :: I Hate Myself and I Want to Die

I decided to bring this post back to life in honor of the new Montage of Heck documentary and album that just came out. Nirvana had quite a few good rarities, but none of them have ever been made into a faithful collection. The documentary is an interesting piece, because it doesn't portray Kurt Cobain favorably and it seems that his public image has changed quite a bit since he passed.

It seems that in a lot of ways Nirvana has become a cultural product with the meaning stripped from it just like  Kurt always feared. Nirvana shirts are still being sold as fashion items and can hang on racks directly beside Guns and Roses shirts, when the bands stood for polar opposite things. Axel Rose penned some racist and homophobic songs like "One in a Million," with the lyrics, "immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to me. They come to our country and think they'll do as they please." In contrast, Kurt was a feminist and outspoken about LGBTQ rights and a very outspoken anti-consumerist and anti-authoritarian. He was trapped in a misogynist, capitalist industry that he was fighting publicly and this side of him often gets overlooked. 

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The infamous 1985 Nirvana demos :: Fecal Matter - Illiteracy will Prevail

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Long thought to no longer exist, the holy grail for Nirvana fans was the 1985 demo tape for a project Kurt Cobain called Fecal Matter. There were a couple of fakes that famously circulated around the internet, but this version is a legitimate recording. There are files out there that have been edited and remastered by amateur engineers, which is mostly what can be found on youtube. So, this version is intended to preserve the initial, unedited leak.

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Bright Eyes Live Set

Bright Eyes :: "Girl from the North Country"

This is a really good live set of Bright Eyes in their prime just before I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning came out, circa 2004 (10.10.04) at Austin City Limits. It's a really good quality recording and the performances are also of good quality. Conor is joined by Mike Mogis, M. Ward and Jim James for a set that is way better than any Monsters of Folk set. They even play a couple M. Ward and My Morning Jacket songs and at the end of the set, an amazing cover of Bob's "Girl from the North Country." The versions of the songs are interesting. Conor does his subtle live lyric changes as in "Waste of Paint," with the line "jerking each other off for positions." There's also an acoustic version of "Hit the Switch" which is excellent. The show happened a month before the November 2nd midterm elections during the Bush administration. Before "Landlocked Blues" Conor declares "I'll use their logic on you: if you vote for Bush, you're going to hell." It's hilarious, check it out around 52 mins in.

Download the whole set here.

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Set list ::

1. Lua

2. Waste Of Paint

3. We Are Nowhere And It's Now (Conor, Mike Mogis)

4. Going For The Gold (Conor, Mike Mogis)

5. Hit The Switch (Conor, Mike Mogis)

6. O'Brien (M. Ward, Conor)

7. First Day Of My Life (M. Ward, Conor)

8. Train Under Water (M. Ward, Conor, Jim James)

9. Golden (M. Ward, Conor, Jim James)

10. Landlocked Blues (M. Ward, Conor, Jim James)

11. Girl From The North Country (M. Ward, Conor, Jim James)

12. At The Bottom Of Everything (M. Ward, Conor, Jim James)

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MONSTERS of Folk

Monsters of Folk - Say Please

The first ever Monsters of Folk album will be released on September 22nd (on Shangri-La in North America, Rough Trade in Europe, Spunk in Australia, and P-Vine in Japan).
The band is Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst, My Morning Jacket's Yim Yames (much more folksy than Jim James) and M. Ward's M. Ward, produced by Mike Mogis.

Here's the first look at the album, the song "Say Please." M. Ward and Mr. Yames are the heaviest vocals in the tune that the group has warned "isn't very folky." It sounds kind of like Oberst's last self-titled release, with an arena rock, 'session band' sort of sound that Oberst has been fond of since Cassadaga and Jim James has been fond of forever.

Our generation has been in desperate need of a good super group and this is the best we could possibly get. At the very least, it should be a fun little folk (or maybe not folky at all) album.

monstersoffolk.com

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