“Miss Misery” by Elliott Smith

"Miss Misery" took Elliott Smith all the way to the Academy Awards: it plays over the closing credits of Good Will Hunting in 1997 and was nominated for Best Original Song in 1998. He'd first recorded it at Jackpot! Recording Studio early in 1997 with a different set of words, a take that later surfaced on the posthumous 2007 collection New Moon, then went back to Jackpot! and cut it again for the film. It belongs to the story of XO, his 1998 album, too, and it's Smith at his most quietly devastating, a melody so pretty it almost hides how bruised the whole thing sounds.

The Ross Harris video sends him wandering Silverlake in a white suit, tailed by a cop, feeding coins into expired parking meters so the officer can't write any tickets. In March 1998 he played it alone with an acoustic guitar on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

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