It’s fitting that Jamie Fisher’s Nobody Broke Your Heart: An Intimate Biography of Elliott Smith opens with an epigraph from the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard: “The individual has manifold shadows, all of which resemble him and from time to time have an equal claim to be the man himself.” This quote captures the life of a musician who remained as much in the shadows as in the light and sets the tone for this intimate and candid new biography of Smith.
Drawing on interviews with family, friends, girlfriends, collaborators—she interviewed 140 people—Fisher offers both an oral history and collection of fans’ notes about Smith’s life and music. She chronicles his childhood in Texas, where he learned to play piano and expressed his earliest interests in music, and his adolescence in Portland, where he formed his first bands, and his college days at Hampshire College, his post-college formation of the band Heatmiser, as well as Smith’s eventual solo career.
