5Ĭoe moves Smith’s drony acoustic guitar part to a deep, downtuned electric guitar, and fills out the song with a ’60s-nodding mellotron part. I imagine Buell iced his fingers for a couple hours after recording this one.

This piano instrumental brings out the pounding rhythm of the original. Despite the change of genre, Peyroux wonderfully captures the haunting and intimate qualities of the original. Smoky, jazzy, and sultry, Madeleine Peyroux’s cover provides a taste of what Smith’s music might have sounded like if he were performing at clubs in the 1940s.

This alt-country rendition features classic three-part harmonies and finger-licking guitar playing, highlighting the upbeat music/downcast lyrics dichotomy that Smith explored throughout his discography. Falls on the dark and mellow end of the multidimensional spectrum of Beck’s output, similar in sound to what he explored on his 2002 album, Sea Change. Recorded live at a memorial show just after Smith’s death, Beck lays down a tribute that, while missing some lyrics, is full of emotion.

Better than that description makes it sound. Knock-Knock re-imagines Either/Or’s opening cut as a moody trip-hop track, complete with a banjo solo. With its near-whispered vocals and dark lyrics, Elliott Smith’s music has always had a personal, headphone-music quality to it-you don’t see many summer barbecue mixes blaring tracks like “2:45 AM.” As a result, the best covers of his songs tend not to stray far from the singer-recording-in-his-bedroom model, but we’ve also included some of the more adventurous interpretations of his work. It doesn’t hurt that the album contains some of his most memorable melodies as well. Elliott Smith’s 1997 release, Either/Or, strikes the perfect balance between the stripped-down acoustic recordings of his early career and the more fleshed-out arrangements that he would later explore.

Elliott smith either or recording