Ghost In Summer Clothes

"There’s a lot of people that get compared to Elliott Smith because they sing softly or fingerpick and it’s just almost always a comparison that I feel is inaccurate because he was a lot more than that. He’s a guy whose music is steeped totally in tradition, but he made is own tradition from it and I think that’s pretty much the highest compliment you could pay another musician. We’re all stealing from somewhere and when you become someone from whom other’s steal, that’s kind of the gold ring. He’s definitely that. I can’t not wear that influence on my sleeve and I don’t give a shit if this makes me uncool or makes me anything other than honest, but I don’t look at that dude as a peer. I will be writing songs until I’m dead and I will never think that my best song is as good as an Elliott Smith song and that’s good, that’s okay. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like what I do or sometimes really like what I do or sometimes think ‘damn, that was really good’, but I look at that guy and it’s in the same way I look at The Beatles or Bob Dylan. Elliott Smith was fucking crazy good. And it’s not the way I look at my peers or my friends, or the guys I play music with or the bands I tour with. He was a guy and a person and a flawed person and complicated and I don’t know him and I never knew him and so I know him as a fan and I know him the way you know him, but I’ve gotten to meet people who did and work with people who have. He was just a person like everybody else, but he was really really really special in terms of a talent and I don’t have any problem acknowledging that and acknowledging that it’s become such a stain on my musical DNA that it would be dishonest and ridiculous for me to be like ‘oh, I don’t really hear it man’. Even if I was to try, and that’s the best part about people like him, you can’t."