“Needle in the Hay” by Elliott Smith

"Needle in the Hay" opens Elliott Smith's self-titled second album, and it was the only single pulled from it, a seven-inch that Kill Rock Stars put out on the first day of 1995, months before the album arrived that July. Smith wrote it alone, and he kept it lean: trumpet and harmonica were recorded for it and then left off the final mix, a version that finally surfaced in 2012. Later, playing with a full band, he'd rough it up with drums and bass and sing it an octave higher.

Pitchfork ranked it 27th among the 200 best songs of the '90s. Wes Anderson put it in The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001, over Richie Tenenbaum's suicide attempt, and Smith was reportedly unhappy with how it was used.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.