Album · Elliott Smith
XO by Elliott Smith
XO is an album by Elliott Smith, released in 1998. 5 songs from it have charted on rock radio countdowns, with 51 countdown appearances in total. The biggest is “Waltz #2 (Xo)”, on 25 lists with a best position of #4.
XO, Elliott Smith's fourth album and his first solo record for a major label, arrived on DreamWorks on August 25, 1998. The groundwork started at Larry Crane's Jackpot Recording Studio after Either/Or, where early demos and outtakes piled up (some surfaced years later on New Moon), and the serious work began in Los Angeles in early 1998 with producers Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock. For a while it was going to be called Grand Mal.
The bigger budget shows: fuller, swelling arrangements now crowd around that thin, whispering voice, but the songs are still hurt and precise, circling the addiction, depression and alienation that ran through all his writing. "Sweet Adeline" opens it, named for the glee club his grandmother sang in, while "Waltz #2 (XO)" and "Baby Britain" became the singles. The album followed hard on "Miss Misery", his Good Will Hunting song, which had earned an Academy Award nomination.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs from XO on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Waltz #2 (Xo) | 25 | #4 | – | 1998–2026 | |
| 2 | Miss Misery | 15 | #22 | – | 1999–2026 | |
| 3 | Baby Britain | 9 | #264 | – | 2005–2022 | |
| 4 | Independence Day | 1 | #359 | – | 2019 | |
| 5 | Sweet Adeline | 1 | #563 | – | 2024 |
Only songs that appear on at least one countdown are listed. Release data from MusicBrainz.