Almost exactly a year after his untimely death -- missing the anniversary by just two days --
Elliott Smith's final recordings were released as the
From a Basement on the Hill album.
Smith had been working on the album for a long time. His last album,
Figure 8, had appeared in 2000, and when it came time to record its follow-up, he parted ways with both his major label, Dreamworks, and his longtime producer/engineer,
Rob Schnapf, working through a number of different producers, including L.A. superproducer
Jon Brion, before recording a number of sessions with
David McConnell, which were supplemented with
Smith's home recordings. At the time of his death,
Smith was still tinkering with the album. There was no final track sequence and only a handful of final mixes; it was closer to completion than
Jeff Buckley's Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, which he intended to re-record, but it was still up to his family to finalize the record. For various reasons, the family chose to work with
Schnapf and
Joanna Bolme -- a former girlfriend of
Smith and current member of
Stephen Malkmus' Jicks -- instead of
McConnell, who went on record with Kimberly Chun of The San Francisco Bay Area Guardian the week before the release of
From a Basement to state that this album was not exactly what
Smith intended it to be. According to
McConnell, as well as
Elliott Smith biographer
Benjamin Nugent,
Smith wanted the album to be rough and ragged, and
McConnell told Chun that "obviously
Elliott did not get his wishes," claiming that three of the songs on the album were considered finished by both him and
Smith, but appear on the record in different mixes.