Elliott Smith

Elliott Smith sang like he didn't want to wake anybody up, and the hush was the whole point. Born in 1969 and raised mostly in Texas, he made his home in Portland, Oregon, where he played in the rock band Heatmiser before striking out on his own in 1994 with records for the independent Cavity Search and Kill Rock Stars labels. His self-titled 1995 album and "Needle in the Hay" were stark and close, the sound of a man and a guitar in a small room.

Either/Or, in 1997, brought "Between the Bars", "Angeles" and "Ballad of Big Nothing", intricate chord changes wrapped around songs about addiction, depression and feeling like an outsider. He signed with DreamWorks in 1997, and "Miss Misery", written for the film Good Will Hunting, got him an Oscar nomination in 1998. XO, that same year, opened the windows, with fuller arrangements and bigger melodies on "Waltz #2", "Baby Britain" and "Sweet Adeline", without losing the ache. Figure 8 followed in 2000 with "Son of Sam". He could play almost anything: guitar first, but piano, clarinet, bass, drums and harmonica too.

His battles with drink, drugs and depression bled into the songs, and in 2003, at 34, he was found fatally stabbed in the chest in his Los Angeles house; the autopsy never settled whether the wounds were his own doing. The album he'd been working on, From a Basement on the Hill, came out the next year.

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