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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." 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. While he has clearly influenced music supervisors, it’s hard to underestimate the extent of Smith’s influence on musicians themselves. Smith’s music continues to affect people and shape musicians’ output. “I’m still surprised when I hear post-Elliott Smith things, like wow he really influenced a lot of people,” said Tony Lash, a high school friend and former bandmate of Smith’s. “What makes Elliott’s music so interesting is its attention to detail – in the lyrics, in the composition and in the production,” says Sadie Dupuis, from Speedy Ortiz and Sad13. “He had an uncanny ability to pepper introspective emotional observations with visual, evocative props.”

Real, perhaps, because it was so deeply rooted. Born Steven Smith into a family from the Community Of Christ church, a Mormon denomination, he was only six months old when his parents split. His mother married an insurance salesman named Charlie Welch, whom Smith would claim first beat him on their wedding day, aged three. His memories of his childhood had always been hazy, but at 14 he left his mother’s home in Texas to live with his father in Portland. “I didn’t sleep at all for about the first six months I lived there,” he told Under the Radar. “I was very worried about my mother.” In another interview, he elaborated: “I couldn’t stay in the same house as my stepfather.” 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.” Honestly, because I had an iPod, I pretty much shuffled everything, so all those records kind of blended together at first. But then, I got really into vinyl. I got all his records on vinyl and that's how I would listen for a long time; they each have a specific vibe and mood. The song " Son of Sam" I really loved right out the gates, because I've always been super fascinated with serial killers. I was like, "Oh my God — you can write about that?" To Bridgers, though, Smith's music is something more than an influence: It's absolutely foundational. "It's like The Beatles to me, and I mean that in every way," she tells me. "If someone doesn't like his music, I actually feel like I'm not going to agree with them about anything. It informs everything I like."

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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. 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.

Phoebe Bridgers: I was in eighth grade. My friend Carla Azar showed me " Kiwi Mad Dog 20/20," which is on Roman Candle. It's a super weird one to start with because it's instrumental. Later, another friend showed me " Waltz #2," which became, and maybe still is, my favorite song of his — I think it just exemplifies his writing. Then I went super deep. 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?

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Only rarely did the lyrics suggest distraction. “Son of Sam”, he explained, concerned not so much the infamous New York serial killer as “a destructive, repetitive person” wrestling with a “clouded mind”. “Junk Bond Trader” spotlit the plight of the artist pressed to “give the people something they’d understand”, and “Everything Means Nothing to Me” was born of a violent reaction, during a 48-hour mushroom trip, to the pressures of having to worry about the future of his “art”. 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.