People can play alone just because they love playing music.” “When people hear acoustic music,” Smith said in a 1998 Magnet interview, “they say, ‘Oh, he sounds like Paul Simon,’ or ‘Oh, a man with a guitar, he must be playing in order to point out things that are wrong with the world.’ Which isn’t necessarily true. Smith had a good reason to be annoyed the one thing that the two musicians had in common was simply that they played an acoustic guitar-a quality that arguably connects the vast majority of rock musicians. And that’s another way in which Smith was unlike Paul Simon Simon’s done plenty worse that he hasn’t apologized for. He called Simon’s lyrics “corny” in an interview with Australian fanzine Spunk, which he later apologized for. And the fact that his self-titled 1995 Kill Rock Stars debut-a primarily acoustic record of stripped-down lo-fi indie folk-seemed to yield the comparisons only seemed to annoy him. He was never married to Carrie Fisher, and he never made a cameo in a Woody Allen movie. He never recorded with Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Elliott Smith also didn’t particularly like being compared to Paul Simon. He is survived by his parents, Gary Smith and Bunny Welch, a sister, a half sister and a half brother.Elliott Smith didn’t sound like Paul Simon. Smith had been working on his sixth album, tentatively titled ''From a Basement on the Hill,'' but his last release was a limited-edition seven-inch vinyl single, ''Pretty (Ugly Before),'' for the independent Suicide Squeeze label. He was signed to DreamWorks Records, which released the albums ''XO'' in 1998 and ''Figure 8'' in 2000, and toured internationally. Smith began recording his songs with producers and backup musicians. (Celine Dion's ''My Heart Will Go On'' won the award.) With the soundtrack, Mr. Smith to write songs for the soundtrack of ''Good Will Hunting,'' and ''Miss Misery'' was nominated for best original song. His first solo album, ''Roman Candle'' (Cavity Search), noted that it was ''recorded on four-track in the basement fall 1993.'' His next two albums, ''Elliott Smith'' and ''either/or,'' both on the Kill Rock Stars label, made him a college-radio staple, and he regularly toured the indie-rock circuit. The group released its first album, ''Dead Air,'' in 1993 on the small Frontier label, and disbanded after releasing its third album, ''Mic City Sons'' (Caroline), in 1996. He also started calling himself Elliott because, he once said, Steve Smith was too alliterative and Steve sounded too ''jockish.'' He graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and returned to Portland, where he and a college friend, Neil Gust, started a punk band called Heatmiser, named after a character in the Christmas cartoon ''The Year Without Santa Claus.'' He studied piano and guitar and at 10 won a local award for a piano piece he composed. He was born in Omaha and grew up in Dallas and in Portland, Ore. ''Miss Misery'' begins, ''I will fake it through the day with some help from Johnnie Walker Red/Send the poison brain down the drain/To put bad thoughts in my head.''Įlliott Smith's real name was Steven Paul Smith. Smith often insisted he was not a confessional songwriter, but he had struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism and had spent a short time in a psychiatric hospital. His sense of melody harked back to the Beatles and to folk-rock, but within the understated settings were bleak stories of turmoil, addiction, domestic violence and despair. In his songs, he wrote about drug abuse, failing relationships, betrayals and occasional glimmers of hope.