King's Crossing

There is a specific weight to the piano that opens this song — not heaviness exactly, but the feeling of something pressing down from the inside. Elliott Smith recorded it in what turned out to be among the last sessions before his death, and that biographical fact is almost impossible to separate from the listening experience, though the music earns its gravity entirely on its own terms. The tempo is slow but not quite a dirge; it drifts and lurches slightly, the way thought does when it's circling something too painful to approach directly. Smith's voice is intimate to the point of discomfort, double-tracked in that characteristic way that makes him sound like he's harmonizing with his own shadow — present and ghostly at once. The production is sparse but not bare: piano, some muted guitar, faint strings that arrive like a tide coming in. The song meditates on the relationship between creative suffering and the compulsion to keep creating, the terrible bargain of artistic consciousness, and the exhaustion of a person who can see clearly but cannot make the seeing stop. It belongs to the canon of late-career confessional songwriting that includes work by people who were quietly falling apart while making something beautiful. You reach for this song in the deep interior hours, when the apartment is quiet and you are trying to understand something about yourself that resists understanding. It is not a song for company.