Elliott Smith – Complete Unreleased Songs: Live Recordings

1.21.2008

Elliott Smith – Complete Unreleased Songs: Live Recordings

elliott_smith As most of you know, I’m a bit of an Elliott Smith discographer. (You can find my compilation of his complete live cover recordings here). Now I’ve started work on his unreleased material, no easy task – even as I was putting these songs together, I stumbled upon “Sorry My Mistake,” a song I’d never heard. In this post, you’ll find the songs that, for the most part, never made their way to the studio, most of which luckily exist in quality recordings. Almost all of them stand alongside his best work – “Flowers for Charlie” and “Mr. Good Morning” would’ve been fine full-band additions to XO or Figure 8, while “I’m Doing Okay, Pretty Good” (AKA “My New Freedom”) has long been one of my favorite Smith songs. The names of these songs have been disputed, so I’ve provided their original fan-titles and where applicable, the “official” titles handed down by various Smith associates in recent years. Tracks after the jump.

Elliott Smith – Complete Live Unreleased Material

“A Silver Chain”^: mp3
“Blue Mood”: mp3
“Flowers for Charlie”: mp3
“I’m Doing OK, Pretty Good” AKA “My New Freedom”: mp3
“Come To Me” AKA “You Make It Seem Like Nothing” (1996): mp3
“Come To Me” AKA “You Make It Seem Like Nothing” (2003): mp3
“Living in a Cage” AKA “Confusion”: mp3
“Mr. Good Morning” AKA “Just Between Us”: mp3
“So Many People” AKA “Confidence Artist”: mp3
“Dancing on the Highway” AKA “Still Here If You Want Me”: mp3
“Dancing on the Highway” (w/ full band): mp3
“Sorry My Mistake”: mp3
“Everything’s OK”*: mp3
“I Figured You Out”**: mp3
“Instrumental,” 10.14.99: mp3
“Unlucky Charm” AKA “Come Out Now”: mp3
“I’m All Over It Now” AKA “Have You Seen Her”: mp3

^ An instrumental version appears on the leaked Jackpot sessions.
* Early version of the alternate “Pretty Mary K” that appears on New Moon.
** A song Elliott gave to Mary Lou Lord because it sounded too much like the Eagles. Her version appears on her EP Martian Saints.

As always, folks, if I’m missing something or you have a better version, please post in the comments or send them my way at rawkblog AT gmail DOT com. Note: In the time since compiling these tracks, studio versions of several of them (“Dancing on the Highway” and “Mr. Good Morning,” for now) have surfaced.

***

Album versions not cutting it for you? Click below for more live Bootlegs, demos and rarities.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Bootlegs, Elliott Smith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Jade

is there a way to get these songs permenantly on my itunes so i can put them on my ipod?
David Greenwald

Right-click, save-as, put them in a folder, add to iTunes.
dan

thanks for these. what a loss
philipp

Hi! Thanks for putting the songs up. There is also an alternate version of "King's Crossing" here: http://www.archive.org/details/esmith2000-05-09.esmith2000-05-09.flacf. Guess you already know it. :) Sadly it's in a bad quality.

And "Dancing on the Highway" is so amazing, i hope a studio version will surface one day. Cheers...
Brian

i've been looking for a good "i figured you out" version. this one is perfect.
shar

THANK-YOU SO MUCH !
ABrutalKins

I can't download these! I need this I have been looking for them for months and I can't find them anywhere please, please, please fix the links!
David Greenwald

check back tomorrow, on their way back
Josh

I am so happy that you put these up. Thank you so much.

Josh
Whitney

I realize this posting is over a year old but I came across it while looking for more of Elliott's live recordings. "Sorry My Mistake" is amazing. I'd only heard the instrumental version before. His performance is dripping with emotion. god, he was amazing...
Hanan

I love you.
Anonymous

thanks very much for uploading the songs!!it's amazing to have a chance to listening these songs that i have never heard them be4..
Patrick

Thank you very much for putting together these songs.

Unfortunately, I find half of them extremely hard to listen to due to an audience that just won't shut the hell up. I am guessing that at least one of those tracks is from a performance live at the henry fonda, with annoying los angelenos chit chatting around the bar instead of listening to the actual concert.

i had the same problem at the jose gonzalez concert - the concert was insanely frustrating.
Keith Berger

Thanks soooooo much for soooooo much good stuff!
chris

that is a great version of flowers for charlie. i'm not sure if i've heard it before.
Anonymous

amazing, thanks so much
Anonymous

i think there's an earlier version of "come to me"... around september of '96. I got it off Trash Treasury. I don't know if its better, but its there. Thanks for all of it though! rock on!
Anonymous

thank you so much for this. it's always a pleasure to find some new elliott. or, rather, to have you find it for me.
Anonymous

actually "everything's ok" is a later version of pretty mary K (other version), not earlier. And there is a recording of it.
enid

thanks for posting these. I've been looking for a good recording of "flowers for charlie" for about five years. now I finally have one!

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Gold Soundz
Can’t argue with that. Strong finish, dudes.
09/03/10
More P4k list commentary
Bummed that on a list of a lot of only semi-obvious picks from artists with bigger, even better songs, Elliott Smith got stuck with “Needle in the Hay,” the song that most plays into the Elliott Smith Was Sad And Took Drugs And Sang About Himself Narrative, when, like Joni Mitchell or Neil Young or his heroes in Big Star and the Beatles, his “confessionalism” was as much storytelling and character study as it ever was diary-page.

Despite “Miss Misery,” it is admittedly the song I think he’s best known for; it is a great and powerful song, but he was and remains so much more than that.

Also, this: “Posthumously parsing Elliott Smith songs— for foreshadowing, for anything— feels like something of a fool’s errand in 2010.”

I don’t know, Amanda, does that mean David Foster Wallace’s books have no meaning now? Or the poems of, like, Samuel Coleridge? What an awfully slippery slope to look for an angle on.

Also really glad “1979” charted so high, song rules, the Pumpkins rule(d), suck it, cred.
09/03/10
The guitars on the No Age album
They sound like volcanoes erupting or meteors killing dinosaurs

It’s amazing that there are songs here at all
09/03/10

Elliott Smith – Complete Unreleased Songs: Live Recordings

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Gold Soundz

More P4k list commentary

The guitars on the No Age album