Going up the scale and back down only to zig-zag around itself, it’s a triumph of the spirit and one of the best articulations of absurdism that has been put to tape. His most idiosyncratic song off the album, “Everything Means Nothing To Me” has a melody that gives the illusion that it doesn’t know where it’s going. When asked about what he thinks this album means, Smith said that making it felt like an “endless little task that doesn’t have any real point to it but it might look good if you stop and look at it.” His philosophy on music has always been that it has no real meaning and that he made it as nothing more than “something to do.” That feeling of aimlessness but doing something in spite of it is the crux of both this record and the legacy of it. An album that at first, no one really knew what to do with, as time has gone by, it’s become a blueprint for all the artists that he has inspired and influenced. Twenty-twenty marks the twentieth anniversary of Smith’s fourth record.

Titled “Bye”, an instrumental lullaby of sorts, it ends the last album that Smith would be alive to see released.

There is something haunting about the final track of Elliott Smith’s Figure 8.

Elliott smith either or recording