‘King’s Crossing’: Elliott Smith’s tragic confession to drug addiction

Posted On January 19, 2025January 19, 2025

It’s an unfortunate shadow that looms over indie singer-songwriter Elliott Smith‘s legacy. Just as Ian Curtis or Janis Joplin’s lives are so entangled with their tragic demises, it’s difficult not to default to a kneejerk flash of his death at 34. In October 2003, Smith reportedly got into an argument with his partner, Jennifer Chiba, at which point she locked herself in the bathroom to take a shower.

Hearing a scream, Chiba came out of the bathroom, alleging to find Smith with a knife in his chest. Dying shortly after arriving at the hospital, a note was left on the fridge: “I’m so sorry—love, Elliott. God forgive me.”

Smith’s life had been blighted by mental health issues, depression, fluctuating drug addiction, drinking, and chemically experimenting since a young teenager. Following the success of the former band Heatmiser, a string of acclaimed lo-fi harmony folk solo records won him a dedicated fanbase intoxicated with his raw confessionals on his inner turmoils.

As his career was reaching new heights off the back of 1997’s Either/Or and signing to Dreamworks label, Smith lapsed into a deep depression and drunkenly threw himself off a cliff in North Carolina, landing on a tree and breaking his fall.

Things would only get worse. While recording the sessions for his final album, paranoia was creeping its way through his heavy drug use, smoking $1,500 worth of heroin and crack a day, according to Goldenboy’s David McConnell. “Not long ago, my house was broken into, and songs were stolen off my computer, which has wound up in the hands of certain people who work at a certain label,” Smith told Under the Radar five months before his death, gleaming an insight to his fraying connection to reality. “I’ve also been followed around for months at a time. I wouldn’t even want to necessarily say it’s the people from that label who are following me around, but it was probably them who broke into my house.”

This downward spiral would be documented in From a Basement on the Hill. Despite embarking on a late period of sobriety before his death, his 2004 posthumous LP contain numerous scabrous allusions to his addiction problems. One of his most stark portraits of junkiedom is the album’s ‘King’s Crossing’, packed with funereal charge in light of his sad demise. A stirring piece with haunting guitar and celestial keys, Smith imbues the sardonic nihilism that lyrically hands in the air with a poetic self-examination that’s hopelessly vulnerable.

Smith flexes a lexicon familiar to any user. “Inject my ex-wife” is routine slang for shooting smack, as is “a rich white lady” euphemism for heroin. Its most eerie refrain is “Give me one good reason not to do it”, tempting to interpret as an expression of suicidal ideation but quite plausibly an admission of relapse, an ebbing faith in staying clean as despondency takes too great a hold.

A gem among a songbook of troubled tenderness, ‘King’s Crossing’ stands as one of his greatest pieces, and an apt eulogy capturing his private ills in all its knotted honesty.

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