“There were a lot of terrible things that happened in Elliott’s life and I didn’t want his history to only be about that - he was one of the funniest people I’ve known in my life.
“I didn’t want it to turn into a biography, I wanted to record conversations that I had had with other people that had been close to him,” de Wilde said about the accompanying content. With the blessing of Smith’s inner circle, de Wilde then dove into a collection of well over 500 photos of Smith, ranging from promotional portraits to snap shots capturing the singer/songwriter at his most intimate, and in the process she opted to pair the photos with candid informal interviews from friends, associates, and musicians. “First I asked his sister, that was really important to me, and then Joanna, his ex-girlfriend in Portland.” “I had all these photos in a box and was thinking about it and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it… I started thinking about it a couple of years ago, and in 2006 I actively started thinking about it as a real thing,” de Wilde says about the book’s birth. caught up with de Wilde, speaking from her home in Los Angeles, to uncover the details, ideas, collaborations, motivations, and ultimately the hardships behind the creation of Elliott Smith.
A portion of the project’s proceeds will be donated to the SIMS Foundation to supply affordable mental health care to musicians, and Outside In, a Portland, OR-based homeless youth non-profit group. The book, also containing Smith’s handwritten lyrics and interviews from Ashley Welch, Smith’s sister, Beck, Ben Gibbard, Chris Walla (Death Cab), and Matthew Caws (Nada Surf), among others, will arrive in November courtesy of Chronicle Books, alongside a five song CD of previously unreleased live material. Elliott Smith, the troubadour behind haunting acoustic compositions such as “Needle in the Hay” whose life came to an untimely end in 2003, will be memorialized with Elliott Smith, a 200-plus-page photo book compiled by renowned photographer Autumn de Wilde, the same lady behind the lens of the cover shot from the singer/songwriter’s 2000 album Figure 8.
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