One night, Schnapf and his partner Margaret Mittleman saw Smith play “Needle in the Hay”, from his self-titled 1995 second album, and soon became his producer and manager, respectively. Word spread of his bewitching performances, the antithesis of grunge but the inheritor of its spirit. Alongside Heatmiser albums, Smith quietly snuck out his first solo collection of minimalist four-track acoustic demos recorded on a borrowed guitar in his basement (1994’s Roman Candle), which, he said, “immediately eclipsed my band, unfortunately”. At college in Amherst, Smith started a noise-grunge band called Heatmiser, but he also took to playing solo acoustic shows when he returned to Portland.
On graduation, he officially took the name Elliott. Smith started writing his own songs on piano and guitar from a young age – his father recalled a church talent show at which his son was beaten by someone tap-dancing to “Yankee Doodle Dandy” – and sang in several high school bands, sometimes under the pseudonym Elliott Stillwater-Rotter. “I was very worried about my mother.” In another interview, he elaborated: “I couldn’t stay in the same house as my stepfather.” “I didn’t sleep at all for about the first six months I lived there,” he told Under the Radar.
His memories of his childhood had always been hazy, but at 14 he left his mother’s home in Texas to live with his father in Portland. His mother married an insurance salesman named Charlie Welch, whom Smith would claim first beat him on their wedding day, aged three. Born Steven Smith into a family from the Community Of Christ church, a Mormon denomination, he was only six months old when his parents split. Real, perhaps, because it was so deeply rooted.
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