Miss Misery (Good Will Hunting)

Elliott Smith recorded this for Good Will Hunting almost accidentally — Gus Van Sant heard a demo and asked to use it — and the song has the quality of something caught rather than constructed. The arrangement is deceptively simple: fingerpicked acoustic guitar, Smith's voice multitracked in close harmony with itself, and small additions that appear and disappear without drawing attention. His guitar playing is technically intricate, his fingerpicking creating a fullness that ordinarily would require multiple players, but the production keeps everything intimate, almost private. His voice is a fragile instrument — soft, slightly breathy — and the harmonies he builds with himself produce a quality of isolated conversation, of someone talking things through inside their own head. The lyric is wry and self-aware about addiction and self-destruction, narrating a slide into bad choices with the detachment of someone watching themselves from a ceiling. There's a specific dark humor in Smith's perspective — he seems to find his own predicament absurd as much as painful — and this refusal of pure pathos gives the song its distinctive tone. He was nominated for an Academy Award and appeared at the ceremony in white tie, visibly uncomfortable, which has become its own emblem: art that belongs to shadows, briefly dragged into the light.