Category: Indie Pop

2005 was a time to be alive. It was the peak of the hipster MP3 blog, and I was subscribed to roughly all of them.

Jonathan Coulton (who later went on to write the phenomenal end credit song from Portal) was releasing a Thing A Week, a new song composed and recorded every day. WFMU’s 365 Days Project unleashed some truly odd music on the world, including Mar-Tie the Avant Garde Grandpa’s Tribute to Beethoven. And NetNewWire, a wonderful RSS reader software I haven’t used in at least 15 years but still remember quite fondly, pushed all of them to my computer in real-time.

One of these blogs, it seems, was written by a serious Elliott Smith aficionado, who one day devoted an entire post to the detailed history of live performances of Elliott Smith’s Division Day. It highlighted his assorted live arrangements of the song over the years, speculated about ways in which the arrangements changed alongside his various life difficulties, and holding this bootleg up as the pinnacle:

I’m not qualified to comment on any of that, except to say that this is, in fact, an absolutely phenomenal performance.

At some point in the nearly two decades since then, I lost the MP3 and assumed it was gone forever – until I found that Archive.org, alongside their better-known archive of the entire Internet, also has an extensive collection of Elliott Smith bootlegs, including this particular show.

Which means I’m now blissfully reunited with (apparently) the all-time best performance of Division Day. Life is good.

(If you enjoyed it too, make a donation to your local suicide hotline in honor of Elliott, who died far too young.)