“I asked him if he could do an a capella arrangement of that song - I was listening to Pet Sounds outtakes,” he recalls. Schnapf remembers how the final track, the choral “I Didn’t Understand,” came to be. I never felt like we had to build fences to maintain it.”Īnd Smith, who seemed to work with a concurrent John and Paul in his head, was able to make crucial adjustments on the fly.

“ was very directed and melodically informed,” Schnapf says.

Schnapf and Crane agree on one crucial aspect of the making of XO: Smith was present, motivated and disciplined throughout. He never did anything he didn’t want to do.” On its follow-up, Smith was ready to dive into polished production.

“On Either/Or, Tom and I could have pushed him more, but he wasn’t ready to go there yet,” he says. Still, Schnapf sees XO as more of a natural progression than a pièce de résistance. Until the making of XO, Smith’s recording process was homespun and ramshackle most of his solo work, including XO‘s predecessor, 1997’s Either/Or, had been recorded in basements and bedrooms. Crane was happy to just be a fly on the wall for most of the album’s development.

Elliott smith either or recording