3/25
andrew jones
on
Elliott Smith, “Thirteen”
(march faxnesS)
For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.
March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee
One evening last September, I stood on a small wooden stage in a backyard at the eastern edge of Iowa and read my essay on Elliott Smith’s cover of “Thirteen” for the first time to a group of community members, friends, and college students. The essay was the center of my reading, surrounded by poems and flash nonfiction pieces about music. In setting the context, I only briefly defined MarchXness for the crowd. I didn’t lament its loss in the first round three years ago to Karen Lentz’s second-seeded essay on Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” I didn’t share just how rewarding the whole experience had been: the messages from readers sharing their own memories of Elliott, the tweets with small analytical takes, the supportive retweets with select pull quotes from the essay, or the connections created with other writers in the tourney. And I didn't tease the themes of nostalgia and sentimentality or fragility and sincerity.
Instead, what I did was acknowledge that my relationship with my daughter serves to bookend the essay. And then I embarrassed her by pointing her out in the crowd and talking about how much she shows up in my work. In the time since this essay lost in the first round, my daughter, now sixteen, has found her own Elliott Smith favorites without my input or suggestion. It might be sentimental, and it will definitely embarrass her again, but there’s a deep sense of pride that swells upon hearing her sing those angsty lyrics from “Roman Candle” at the top of her voice when she doesn’t know I’m listening. I think you’d all dig her rendition. And I think Elliott would too. —Andrew Jones
Gut Punch of Sincerity: Andrew Jones on elliott smith’s “Thirteen”
won’t you let me walk you home from school
There exists in the history of Google Street View images, three frames at the corner of University and Pennsylvania avenues in Dubuque, Iowa where my daughter and I are visible. Today, you need to shift the street view back to 2013 to find us, but we are there, in the crosswalk, holding hands. It is an October afternoon and it is still warm. My daughter wears a dress with four horizontal panels of mostly purple and I’m carrying her pink Hello Kitty backpack. She’s four and we are walking home after she’s completed another day of pre-K at the Montessori school in town. The school is housed in a former community theater building shaped like a barn and shares a parking lot with the public pool. It didn’t take much imagination on my part to find the lyrics from “Thirteen” rattling around in my head while I waited to pick her up one day, and so it became my tradition to sing it on our walks home that year.
The first time I heard “Thirteen” was in the fall of 1997. I’d sought out Big Star after hearing Son Volt cover “Holocaust” in concert that summer and I’d come away with a reissue of #1 Record and Radio City as a single CD. But nothing from the CD stuck with me. I was about to turn 19, a freshman at the local state college, and a bit of an alternative country snob. I wasn’t very interested in the pop elements Alex Chilton and Chris Bell layered on Big Star’s tunes. The songs weren’t bad; I just wasn’t ready for them in that form.
In August of 1998, I read about the release of Elliott Smith’s XO and took a chance on it. In a short span of time, I began consuming all things Elliott. I’d made my way into the magic of music listservs and AOL messageboards where folks traded live bootlegs or offered up “blanks and postage” deals for those without much of a bootleg collection. In one of these deals, I received a VHS tape of an Elliott Smith concert which proved almost unwatchable. The camera shook incessantly and the sound was drowned out by bass distortion. But tacked onto the VHS tape, in an attempt to fill the extra runtime after the concert, was the short film Lucky 3: An Elliott Smith Portrait. Directed by Jem Cohen and running all of 11 minutes, this documentary presented Smith performing two original songs with a cover of “Thirteen” sandwiched in between. It proved to be the performance I needed to appreciate the song.
rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay
In Lucky 3, Smith performs “Thirteen” in October of 1996 in what appears to be an empty, generic office space cleared of cubicles and desks. Fluorescent lighting shines down on him, adding a glow to the drab yellow dress shirt he wears. Smith sits on a chair with his acoustic guitar before a simple microphone, a keyboard of some sort leaning against the wall nearby. The only embellishment is an ironic blacklight poster featuring a heavy metal skeleton proclaiming “Rock Is King” on the wall behind him.
The majority of the performance is filmed from Smith’s right, providing only a side view of his face as he sings and his hands as they pluck through the progression of the song. The emptiness of the scene adds to the weight of the performance. There are no visual distractions— it’s like listening to a friend play a personal song in a dim basement or bedroom. Nothing covers up Smith’s gentle voicing and the quiet guitar. He’s captivating for the two-and-a-half minutes of performance. And when he finishes, he poses to mimic the poster behind him: one raised fist, the other hand holding his guitar in the air by the neck, his face a serious scowl as if to lighten the mood after such a trance-like performance.
“Thirteen” has been praised repeatedly as a perfect take on what adolescence feels like. Many of the commentaries claim that songwriter Alex Chilton’s thirteen-year-old speaker captures the feeling as if a teen wrote the song. And, to be sure, Big Star’s original version (1972) sparkles with pop power—dreamy production, layered guitars, and accompanying ethereal vocal harmonies elevating the 2nd and 3rd verses. The production hints at a desire to appeal to teens and pop radio rather than the honesty of an adolescent point of view. In doing so, it actually hurts the song.
This is why Elliott Smith’s version is the superior take on the song. Like the performance in Lucky 3, Smith’s officially released version comes from 1996. It was recorded in April and debuted on Oregon disc jockey Rob Jones’ radio show later that summer before appearing on the posthumous rarities collection New Moon (2007). The recording features Smith alone in his basement with a single guitar and his voice—his sweet spot. While Smith’s later recordings display his ability to build masterfully intricate full-band songs in the studio, his solo acoustic performances have always carried a heftier gut punch of sincerity and power.
Many covers of the song miss the mark because they try to create emotion through the production—vocal harmonies and ambient noise layers attempting to manufacture a mocked-up dream of the past or they awkwardly emphasize certain words for effect. It becomes an exercise in creating manufactured emotion and sonic perfection—a sort of nursery rhyme, if you will. It’s as if the performers are afraid of something quiet and imperfect, the very sort of memory that the song reawakens in an adult listener.
come inside, well it’s okay
The first time I saw Elliott Smith perform in person was March of 1999 at a free in-store gig for Amoeba Records in San Francisco. It was an afternoon performance and I had arrived well ahead of the show with my best friend, Jody. We staked out a center spot a few rows of used CDs back from the tiny stage. Much like Lucky 3, the set up was Elliott seated, an acoustic in his hands, and a single microphone. He started off shaky and seemed unhappy to be performing so early in the day. But after just one song, he settled into a zone and played ten more songs over 40 minutes. I don’t think anyone in the crowded record store expected that much of a show but they were quite possibly the best crowd I’ve ever been a part of—quiet, rapt, polite.
After he finished playing, we dodged the line snaking away from a small table where Smith would soon come out to sign merchandise and instead headed straight over to the Fillmore Auditorium where we had tickets for his show later that night with Quasi opening and then pulling double duty as Smith’s band. We were there hours before the doors would open and we were unsure what else to do, so we leaned against the fence of the empty lot next to the Fillmore where Jim Jones’ People’s Temple once stood, content to wait in the late afternoon sun. Some forty-five minutes later, a car stopped on the street and Smith emerged, immediately lighting up a cigarette. He spotted us and walked over to ask if we were waiting for the show already. We explained that we didn’t know what else to do since we weren’t yet twenty-one and couldn’t go for a drink. He stood around with us and we chatted about the in-store performance until he finished his smoke. We shook hands and he walked through the rear entrance. We didn’t ask for autographs or pose for a picture with Smith and, unfortunately, there wasn’t a Google car driving by the corner of Fillmore and Geary that spring day. Elliott Smith wasn’t shy or indifferent. He didn’t come across as the depressed or drugged-out artist as he was so often portrayed. He was caring and he seemed almost as embarrassed as us that someone would want to wait so long to see him perform.
So much of the writing about “Thirteen” fails to consider how much nostalgia and sentimentality are needed to make it work. I always thought of the song as the tender expression of unrequited love of another (and of music). The opening verse serves as an attempt at connection with another—hopeful and expectant and awkward. “Won’t you let me meet you at the pool,” followed by “maybe Friday I can get tickets for the dance/and I’ll take you.” Once the connection—however tenuous—is established, it consumes the speaker and pushes logic aside: “tell him what we said,” “rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay,” “I’ll shake you.” Nothing can stand in the way. Eventually, the speaker ends up beyond infatuation, blindfold removed, wanting an honest, open way forward: “tell me what you’re thinking of,” “would you be an outlaw for my love,” and “if it’s no, then I can go.” The three parts of the song are like an understanding of relationships maturing in the short span of three minutes.
There is a level of anxiety in the way Elliott Smith delivers his version. The speed is a little faster and the vocals more uneven. His voice seems constantly on the verge of breaking or even going silent. It’s the same way it sounded at Amoeba Records. There’s a begging, pleading element in its softness. The phrasing quickened and then slowed. As a listener, I worry he might not make it. It’s imperfect and intimate and fragile. And there is its beauty.
The seemingly simple lyrics take on more weight as an adult than as a teenager. Hope waits around the corner at thirteen; the devastation of rejection or missed connection ends up being a fleeting aside because there is so much expectation ahead. But later in life, it’s much easier to tally the marks and consider that there will be fewer chances in our future. Or maybe it has to do with the clock stopping so early for Elliott Smith in October of 2003. Perhaps knowing that he’ll sink a kitchen knife into his heart at the age of 34 adds to the honesty I hear in his vocals, the fleeting sound of hope and time disappearing on the recording.
won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of
A good song, like a good book, finds new meaning for the listener at different points in their life. My life is now much more concerned with “won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of” than meeting anyone by the pool. I've become the dad who needs to chill with jokes and questions and unprompted advice or stories (“won’t you tell your dad, ‘get off my back’”). Listening to this song at 43 years old is about accepting roles, remembering the past, and learning to let go. In some ways, it’s like being a teen again, except now I’m more concerned with someone I love getting hurt than my own pain. Which might be why this song appeals to me now—I can imagine the peril or joy that might await the speaker much more clearly and how fraught either path that awaits them will be. Maybe that’s always been the case. Maybe, for me, the song has always been about sentimentality and the concern for someone else.
If anything about this song appeals to teens, it’s the musical simplicity and quiet in a sea of angst and confusion. Especially Elliott Smith’s cover. It’s raw and brittle and heartfelt. It’s a safe haven of sound for two minutes and forty-three seconds.
In a few weeks, my daughter will turn thirteen on a March day almost exactly twenty-three years after I stood silently watching Elliott Smith sing softly in a record store. Around the same time, she plans to attend her first middle school dance. She doesn’t remember me singing “Thirteen” to her on our walks home or pointing at the Google car in the Street View image of us. But recently she was sitting on the couch next to me, phone in her hands playing a video game, when I tracked down and played the YouTube clip of Elliott Smith singing “Thirteen” in Lucky 3. She remembered the opening verse and she quietly sang along, before giving her full attention to the second half of the video. When it reached the short guitar solo prior to the final verse, she asked me who was performing. “Elliott Smith,” I answered.
“He’s good,” she conceded, before turning her attention back to her phone when the song ended. She didn’t complain when I replayed it right away, waiting for nostalgia to wash over me.
Andrew Jones is the author of the poetry collection Liner Notes (Kelsay Books, 2020). His writing has appeared in North American Review, Sierra Nevada Review, and Hobart, among other publications. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he teaches at the University of Dubuque in Iowa.