Miss Misery Technique

Elliott Smith's music always seemed to be evolving. The sparse, acoustic sound of his first release, Roman Candle, led to the heavily orchestrated pieces on Figure 8. "Miss Misery," which isn't on...

Smith described the musical construction of his songs this way:I might think of [an instrument] sort of like a person who, maybe they're talking in the first verse, then in the second verse a new i...

Rhyming in songs and poetry is an old tradition. Okay, that's an understatement—it's a really old tradition. Scholars are hard-pressed to say exactly how it started or why, but for some reason,...