Singer Smith Apparently Commits Suicide

10/22/2003 8:00 PM, AP
Ryan Pearson

Elliott Smith , a singer-songwriter whose dark, introspective songs won him critical acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for the film "Good Will Hunting," has apparently committed suicide, coroner's officials said Wednesday. He was 34.

Smith's body was found by his live-in girlfriend Tuesday, Los Angeles County Coroner Records Supervisor Marsha Grigsby told AP Radio. He sustained a single stab wound to the chest that appeared to be self-inflicted, she said.

"He sort of shut everyone out for the last three or four years, he just became really reclusive," said Mary Lou Lord , a singer-songwriter who toured with Smith and has covered his songs. "Maybe he was in a downward spiral and he didn't want to take everyone else with him."

Smith released five solo albums that received widespread acclaim from rock critics and garnered modest commercial success. "Miss Misery," recorded for Gus Van Sant 's "Good Will Hunting," was nominated for an Oscar in 1998.

Smith's songs often were compared with those of Alex Chilton , Nick Drake and the Beatles, his favorite band.

Lyrically, they addressed dark subject matter such as drug addiction, troubled relationships and loneliness — though Smith tried to distance himself from the label of confessional songwriter.

"I don't feel like my songs are particularly fragile or revealing," he said in a 1998 interview in the Los Angeles Times. "It's not like a diary, and they're not intended to be any sort of superintimate confessional singer-songwriterish thing."

However, Smith had recently spoken in interviews about his struggles with alcoholism. "When I lived in New York I was really a bad alcoholic for a few years," he told Under the Radar magazine in an interview published in June 2003.

In an effort to quit drinking, Smith said he had undergone treatment which administers an intravenous solution meant to clear the bloodstream of toxins.

Smith was born Steven Paul Smith in Nebraska; his mother was a singer and his father was a psychiatrist. He spent most of his childhood with his mother in the suburbs of Dallas and then moved to Portland, Ore., while in high school to live with his father.

He studied piano and guitar as a youth and began composing songs when he was 13. He began calling himself Elliott in middle school, he later explained to a reporter, because Steve sounded too "jockish."

A graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., he later joined a Portland punk band called Heatmiser. On the side, he recorded several solo albums — "Roman Candle" (1994), "Elliott Smith" (1995) and "Either/Or" (1997), all on independent labels — that won him a devoted underground following.

In 1997, Van Sant approached him with an offer to use several of Smith's songs on the "Good Will Hunting" soundtrack. The hit movie brought Smith's music to a mainstream audience.

"I think he liked the idea of 'Good Will Hunting' mostly because his mom liked it," Van Sant said Wednesday. "He liked it because she could tell her friends, 'This is what Elliott's doing,' as opposed to, 'My son is making lo-fi records in Portland, Oregon.'"

Smith subsequently signed with DreamWorks Records and recorded two albums; "XO" (1998) and "Figure 8" (2000) continued his critical winning streak, and took him to the middle reaches of Billboard's Top 200 albums chart.

His cover of The Beatles' "Because," plays over the closing credits of "American Beauty," and his song "Needle in the Hay" plays during "The Royal Tenenbaums" as one of the characters attempts suicide.

He told AP Radio in a 2000 interview that he didn't mind being remembered mostly as the "Good Will Hunting" guy.

"I liked that movie. I thought it was really nice that Gus put my songs in it. There's always some sort of name tag on any band, any person, so if that's the one I have, that's great."

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Associated Press writer Justin Glanville in New York contributed to this report.