Controversy Over "New" Elliott Smith Releases
posted in: Music News • Pop • Rock
[Updated below] Yesterday, Mike Doughty, of Soul Coughing and a.k.a UUL, posted three tracks to his Soundcloud page that feature the late, great Elliott Smith‘s vocals over some electronic beats.
Smith fans are less than enthusiastic about the tracks are positively irate over Doughty posting them at all. It’s easy to argue that Smith, now 10 years gone, would not have wanted these released. They are at best a curiosity, with okay but nothing special beats, and some obviously tossed-off Smith vocals – one of the songs would evolve into “Bottle Up and Explode!” from Smith’s acclaimed XO, and another has a rather obnoxiously repetitive sample of Smith saying “Aah fuck” from an outtake. Doughty says that they had an idea to do something together while Smith was working on the “Good Will Hunting” soundtrack, and that Smith came in and sang acapella into a stereo mic setup. Listen:
There’s something inherently creepy about releasing this kind of thing when Smith is not around to bless it. Perhaps if so much time had not elapsed, you might think that his participation/contribution alone was tacit approval. “To be totally clear–this kind of track is exactly what he and I intended to make,” Doughty writes. But with the understanding that at least one of these melodies/lyrics already became something else, that another is an outtake which he very likely did not intend to be used, and that no matter what happened back in the late ’90s when this was recorded, 15 years is time enough that he probably would have at least wanted to re-evaluate it, it does seem to err on the side of bad taste.
Some fans have compared this to Natalie Cole inserting her vocal on father Nat King Cole‘s “Unforgettable” decades after his death, or, far worse (at least that was her dad), Kenny G‘s defilement of Louis Armstrong‘s “What a Wonderful World,” but that doesn’t exactly hold up. Smith did indeed voluntarily contribute his vocal and understood that Doughty was going to use it in some unspecified way. Armstrong and Cole the elder had no such expectation.
But, again, it’s still kind of…unseemly.
[UPDATE: BDCWire has some additional insight in the form of a 1997 essay by Doughty where he appears to mention the session and contradict his present-day claims, at least in part.]
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