It’s not an encouraging sign that Seth Avett and Jessica Lea Mayfield open their Elliott Smith covers album with "Between the Bars". If it’s not his biggest hit (that would be the Oscar-nominated "Miss Misery"), it’s certainly Smith’s most-covered song by a long shot, with jazz interpretations by Madeleine Peyroux and Christopher O’Riley; faithful renditions by Chris Garneau and someone or something called Saucy Monky; live versions by Metric and Agnes Obel; even a strange performance by Madonna, of all people. Millions of YouTubers with a guitar and a digital camera have uploaded a homemade cover, and are probably still doing so as of this writing.
With so many versions out in the world, it’s difficult to put a new signature on the tune, and maybe Avett and Mayfield should get credit for not even trying to make it their own. Instead, they sing it with an almost defiant reverence, as though consciously blurring the line between cover and karaoke. They dutifully preserve the structure and the tone of the original, adding only a few new details, such as the short, descending bass theme in the intro and the gentle stridency in the acoustic strums. Yet, for all their faithfulness, they can’t quite convey the conflicted emotions or the bleak undercurrents of Smith’s lyrics.
Seth Avett & Jessica Lea Mayfield Sing Elliott Smith is a document of two talented musicians trying to figure Smith out. The duo conceived this project in 2011 when the Ohio singer-songwriter toured with the Avett Brothers. On backstage pianos as well as in professional studios, they picked their favorite tunes, devised new arrangements, and worked out new harmonies. Nearly everything on the album, however, will sound immediately familiar to any Smith fan, and any Smith newcomer is advised to check out Either/Or or XO first. That rambunctious piano still storms its way into "Baby Britain" at the same time, as though Avett sampled that part from the original. The guitar notes on "Ballad of Big Nothing" still bend into the same shapes. At least they punch up a pretty straight reading of "Somebody That I Used to Know" with some electric guitars and a rhythm section—a fine interruption of the album’s general solemnity.
But the only real risk they take is on Mayfield’s sped-up, roughed-up reimagining of "Roman Candle", off Smith’s 1994 debut. It’s brash and assertive, with Mayfield turning the violent central lyric ("I want to hurt him, I want to cause him pain") on its head simply by changing the gender of its deliverer. Most of Smith’s songs sound aggressively lonely, as though he could never get out of his own head to connect with other people; having two voices on these songs could potentially transform Smith’s monologues into conversations, presumably between lovers. Especially on "Baby Britain" and "Somebody That I Used to Know", Avett and Mayfield strike an easy chemistry together, her exquisitely drowsy drawl offsetting his more expressive vocals. Still, they don’t play up the idea of Sings as a duets album, nor do they try to adjust the songs’ points of view or find new implications in the lyrics. Perhaps in the end they are simply too smitten with the idea of Smith as a beautifully doomed artist to create anything beyond a loving, reverent, and therefore sheepish tribute.
