He was remembering traumatic things,” Chiba said to Spin and, while Welch denies any wrongdoing, Smith spoke obsessively about his belief that his stepfather had abused him. “My stepfather used to take me up to the attic,” he told his friend Andrew Morgan, according to Spin. “That’s all I remember. I don’t remember what he did.” Whether or not you can ever know an artist through his music isn’t nearly as important as if the songs speak to you – if they can help you through a broken heart, or inspire you to call the person you like, or even to finish your workout at the gym. Music transcends the artist’s biography or even intent, which is part of the reason people don’t mind mondegreens, because mishearing lyrics almost doesn’t matter if you love a song. To crib from Smith himself, new fans may never know him now, but they’re going to love him anyhow. Cannon – and many, many other people – feel like Smith’s music spoke to him directly, like a secret that was for his ears only. “Because of the way he talks about things that are going on, and because of who he is, you feel like you know him through his music,” said Cannon. Lindsay Zoladz: I'm 33 now, so I was in high school when Elliott Smith died. I have a pretty vivid memory of it — I definitely wrote a really bummed LiveJournal entry that day. Since you got into his music after he was already gone, I'm curious about your earliest memories of listening to him, and what record you started with. On his 34th birthday, on 6 August 2003, Smith quit drinking overnight, and also soon gave up red meat, caffeine and sugar. “He might have been cleaned up, but he was not well… still super paranoid,” Schnapf says, yet Smith felt hopeful enough to propose to Chiba in the studio. Then, following an argument in their Echo Park apartment in the afternoon of 21 October, Chiba claims she emerged from the shower to find Smith with a knife in his chest. He died in hospital an hour later. His final album, From a Basement on the Hill, would be completed and compiled by Schnapf and Smith’s family posthumously.

Shortly after the release of his fifth studio album, Figure 8 — the last record he'd finish in his lifetime — Elliott Smith told a Boston Herald writer why he was so drawn to that titular image. "I liked the idea of a self-contained, endless pursuit of perfection," he said. "But I have a problem with perfection. I don't think perfection is very artful. But there's something I liked about the image of a skater going in a twisted circle that doesn't have any real endpoint. So the object is not to stop or arrive anywhere; it's just to make this thing as beautiful as they can." Though she only came to his work after his death, Phoebe Bridgers has listened to Elliott Smith's Figure 8 more times than she can count. Her second album, Punisher, is out in June. The breadth and depth of XO astonished even his benefactors. “The clarity and continuity of [his] thought is amazing,” said Wood. “He can take a metaphor…and sing about it for three minutes and never leave.” Waronker himself said that Smith was “as good as it gets when you’re talking about layers within lyrics.” On the stunning closing chorale, “I Didn’t Understand,” Smith sighs the line: “My feelings never change a bit, I always feel like shit/I don’t know why, I guess that I just do.” It sounds like a pure depiction of depression, in all its weariness and ingrained fatalism. It sounds, as it always does, like confession, like the truth that remained after exhaustion had burned away all artifice. For his part, Lash, Smith’s friend and former Heatmiser bandmate, doesn’t think it’s possible to really know Smith through his music. “I think people ascribe more autobiographical content than is really there. There was a lot more to him and his personality than what he put into his songs,” said Lash, who thinks the biggest misconception about Smith is that he went through life gloomy and heartbroken. “His awesome sense of humor doesn’t come through in his music and it was a very important part of his personality,” he said. “Just taking his music would give people a pretty skewed, narrow sense of who he was.”

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It's kind of hard for me to believe this album is 20 years old, because in a lot of ways it still sounds very fresh. Do you think it would find an audience if a record like this were released today?

Right now I've been listening to " Bye" a lot, which I know is weird because it's another instrumental. But my favorite song song is probably " Easy Way Out." I love that one. The nadir came in North Carolina that year, where a severely intoxicated Smith was impaled on a tree during an impulsive attempt on his own life. “I jumped off a cliff,” he told Spin. “But it didn’t work … It wasn’t like I made up my mind to throw myself off a cliff. I got freaked out and started running, it was totally dark, and I ran off the edge of a cliff. I saw it coming up, and it wasn’t like, ‘I’m gonna throw myself off this cliff and die.’ It was just, ‘Ground’s coming up. Who cares, whatever.’” At the time this record came out in 2000, some people were kind of miffed that he'd signed to a major label and started making more elaborate arrangements — like it automatically meant he was selling out. We don't talk about those things in quite the same way anymore, and when you listen to a record like Figure 8 now, that narrative kind of falls away. Was it ever on your radar with him?

Totally — maybe even more than XO , this is the record of his that I associate with inventive production choices just as much as I do great songwriting. From a production standpoint, are there elements on this record that have inspired your own music directly? Smith soon left Portland for Brooklyn, characteristically low. His New York roommate Dorien Garry told Spin: “He always talked about suicide… He made me promise that I wouldn’t be mad at him. He just talked about it as if it were going to happen.” When Either/Or originally came out at a time when grunge was still big, Sugar Ray and Smashmouth were hitting the charts alongside the Spice Girls and the Notorious BIG, but Smith created a subtly devastating album using nothing but pretty guitar chords, carefully crafted chamber-pop arrangements and intimate lyrics. The album has made a lasting impression on musicians and music fans across all genres – even Frank Ocean mentioned Smith’s influence in the liner notes to Blonde – and his fanbase continues to grow. Oh yeah. It was actually really close to my house when I was first living by myself. I would go to it for his birthday, and then I would go across the street to Garage Pizza and have a slice of pizza. I met a couple weirdos like that. But yeah, I've been many times and was very, very upset when they cut a f****** hole into it. I get it why some Elliott fans hate it, because it's just a place where he took a photo. But it's like, where else? Are we supposed to stand outside of his f****** house? I like it as a thing. I like that people keep writing on it. I liked the year they turned it into all paper — it was a bunch of little Post-Its. That was really cool.