50 Years of Music: 2000 – Elliott Smith - "Somebody That I Used To Know"

As KEXP celebrates its 50th anniversary, we're looking back at the last half-century of music. Each week in 2022, KEXP pays homage to a different year and our writers are commemorating with one song from that year that resonates with them. This week, Dusty Henry looks back at Elliott Smith’s 2000 song “Somebody That Used To Know” and how it soundtracks fading memories and making peace with the passage of time. Read or listen to the piece below. 

For years, I’d dreamed of making the pilgrimage to the mural. A swooping design of red, black, and white lines had become synonymous with Elliott Smith after he’d posed in front of it on his Figure 8 album, the last record he’d release before his death. I’d read about how it’d become a memorial, practically a holy site, where Smith fans left candles and scribbled messages and remembrances on the wall. For an artist whose music seemed best to encapsulate longing, lonely emotions, it felt like a way to be connected through enduring, communal grief. 

At 21, my girlfriend and her roommate proposed the idea of a road trip to Los Angeles over spring break. While I was content to go on with whatever plans were in store, I could care less about hitting the beach or the LA nightlife – the only thing I was insistent on was making it out to Silverlake and finally seeing this sacred indie rock landmark. 

When we got there, I was crushed. Spraypaint and wheatpaste stickers smothered the wall, the red, black, and white lines barely peeking through the chaos. Some fan messages could be faintly seen through the layers of messy paint. I forced a smile and tried to recreate Smith’s signature pose for our disposable camera and left. 

Driving away, I thought back on the first time I remembered seeing that cover. In your youth, the best music is that that’s bestowed upon you by someone slightly older and infinitely cooler. Without older siblings with record collections to sift through, I coveted these moments. When a friend who’d recently graduated heard I was just dipping my toes into Elliott Smith, she was insistent that I take her CD copy of Figure 8. I’d just gotten my driver’s license as well and these two became a crucial pairing. 

While my favorite Elliott Smith records veer toward the stark, blurry, heartbreak of his Portland, Oregon era records like Either/Or and his self-titled LP, Figure 8 is much more conducive to blaring from car speakers while drifting through adolescent limbo. Released in 2000, Figure 8 was the second album Smith recorded primarily in Los Angeles for Dreamworks Records. Whether he was recording lo-fi or in glossy studios on a major label’s dime, there’s permeating loneliness throughout all of his work. And Smith seemed to revel in the aesthetics of L.A. – a contrast of beautiful weather and people with smog and seedy underbellies off the main strips. 

Even as his brightest record, he still has songs like the serial killer name-dropping “Son of Sam" or the haunting ballad “Everything Means Nothing to Me.” Because Figure 8 was always in my car, it became a soundtrack to these last years of high school and teenage malaise. In particular, I found myself constantly hitting to back button to replay “Somebody That I Used To Know.” 

It soundtracked my heartbreaks, my worries about the future, and my longing to get out of my hometown that felt increasingly suffocating. The song is a bittersweet kiss-off to the past, underscored by some of Smith’s finest finger-picking. Both an ambivalent eye-roll saying “I really don’t care, go on and live your life” and reassurance to yourself that you can move on and be fine as you choose to move forward without whoever it is holding you back. It can be read as a break-up song or a friendship drifting apart. But as time goes on, I find it makes me think more of the idea of the past itself. Time feels like it moves so slowly when you’re a kid. Your past is proportionally closer to you in your youth than any other point in your lifespan. Then you get older and was once “closer than it may appear” is now just a speck in the rearview mirror. 

Years after my first trek, I’d return to the Figure 8 mural, but purely by coincidence. In the time since my original visit, I’d seen articles about how the mural was restored, and then subsequently partially destroyed to make room for a swanky bar naming itself after Smith’s song “Angeles” before closing down two years later. That same girlfriend from my first visit was now my wife and on a trip to LA we decided to check out a new raved-about Filipino restaurant. I was shocked to see those spiraling stripes colliding with the front door and right into the Filipino flag. The painting looked better, but only existed as half of itself. A couple of years removed from that experience and even that restaurant is no longer there. 

Within the mural and “Somebody That I Used to Know,” I’m struck with the melancholy of the fading past. Memories and people fade away, sometimes by choice, or more than likely they just drift away without notice. But there are lasting impressions that never leave. Like Smith’s enduring music, or the remnants of tri-color stripes on an L.A. wall.