Figure 8 Is the Sound of Elliott Smith Testing Every Room at Once

Elliott Smith performed at the 1998 Academy Awards in a white suit, eyes downcast, playing an abbreviated version of "Miss Misery" to the largest audience of his life, and then went and made the most expensive, most orchestrated, most carefully assembled record he would ever touch. The connection between those two facts is the whole story of Figure 8. The Oscars moment gave a man who had been recording on four-track equipment access to rooms he had only read about, and the roughly two years between that ceremony and the album's release on April 18, 2000, document what happens when a songwriter's ambitions and a major label's budget finally point in the same direction.

The path there ran through DreamWorks Records. After "Miss Misery" received its Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song from Good Will Hunting, Smith signed with the label, releasing XO in 1998 as his first major-label record. XO had already moved him away from the lo-fi sparseness of his Kill Rock Stars years, trading bedroom intimacy for something more orchestrated. Figure 8 pushed further still. Recorded across 1998 through 2000 at Sunset Sound Recorders, Sonora Studios, and Capitol Studios in Hollywood, and at Abbey Road Studios in London, the album cost what Kill Rock Stars albums did not cost, and it sounded like it. According to William Todd Schultz's biography Torment Saint, Smith had mentioned offhandedly that he'd love to record at Abbey Road someday, and someone at DreamWorks simply booked the session. That kind of access does not come with an indie-label deal, and Smith knew it.

The production team stayed consistent with XO: Smith co-produced with Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, the same pair who had helped him graduate from the cassette-and-bedroom aesthetic of his earlier records. What changed was the scale of what they attempted. Smith arranged all the strings himself, a credit confirmed on the album's liner notes, with Matt Dunkley and Suzie Katayama serving as conductors and orchestrators on specific tracks. Save for those string parts and a handful of drum and bass contributions, Smith played everything on the album himself. Sam Coomes appears on bass across several tracks, Pete Thomas and Joey Waronker each handle drums at various points, and Jon Brion adds backing vocals to "Color Bars," the twelfth track. The impression the record leaves, though, is of one person building something very large in a series of very grand rooms, mostly alone.

The songs cooperate with that impression. "Happiness," released as the first single on February 8, 2000, opens with a piano figure that feels almost classical before the arrangement fills in around it. "Son of Sam," the second single, released April 11, 2000, is the most outwardly kinetic thing Smith ever put his name to, a power-pop sprint that could have come off a mid-period Beatles record and probably knew it. "Stupidity Tries" has the same widescreen confidence. Then the album turns around and gives you "I Better Be Quiet Now" and "Everything Reminds Me of Her," which are essentially the same Elliott Smith who recorded Roman Candle in a hallway, just in a room that cost considerably more per hour. The acoustic framework of those songs would have stood on Either/Or. Here they sit inside arrangements dense with electric guitars, pianos, and strings, and the contrast is the album's actual subject, the tension Smith was genuinely interested in exploring rather than resolving.

Figure 8 was Smith's second and final DreamWorks release, and his fifth studio album overall. The commercial math told a particular story: XO had sold around 360,000 copies, Figure 8 around 265,000. The numbers were declining, and the kind of budget that books Abbey Road sessions requires a certain trajectory. What the sales figures miss is what the record actually accomplished, which was to hold two versions of Smith in tension without forcing a resolution. The album had been initially titled Place Pigalle, after the square in Paris, which gestures at the kind of romantic, slightly cinematic self-image Smith was trying on during this period. He settled on Figure 8 instead, a title he connected to a Schoolhouse Rock song he had covered but left off the final tracklist. The image of a figure eight, a loop that crosses itself and keeps going, fits the record better than any straightforward title could.

Smith died in Los Angeles on October 21, 2003, making Figure 8 the last album he completed in his lifetime. That fact has a way of pulling the record into a particular light, and it is worth resisting the pull just enough to hear the album on its own terms. The DreamWorks years gave Smith the budget to test both the grand and the intimate at full scale, in the same room, sometimes in the same song. Figure 8 is the document of that test. The loop keeps crossing itself.