“Sweet Adeline” by Elliott Smith

"Sweet Adeline" opens XO, the 1998 record that brought Elliott Smith to DreamWorks and made it his first solo album on a major label. The title reaches back into family memory: he named it after the glee club his grandmother sang in, Sweet Adelines International, a homespun, old-timey image to hang on the front door of a record this bruised.

The album, which once carried the working title Grand Mal, got started at Larry Crane's Jackpot Recording Studio after Either/Or came out in 1997, and Smith headed to Los Angeles early in 1998 to get down to business with Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock. The three of them recorded and mixed this one together. Smith had been on a major before, with Heatmiser's last album, Mic City Sons, but never under his own name.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.