When Mark Baumgarten, WW's former music editor who is now the editor of Seattle Weekly, moved to Portland from Minneapolis in the summer of 2003, he says he expected to interview a bunch of "up-and-coming sad bastards." Instead, he found a scene whose energy had returned to the loud rock bands that Smith's whispered melancholia had supposedly replaced. Smith's contemporaries, like Hazel's Pete Krebs and Crackerbash's Sean Croghan, joined him in exploring their softer, folkier sides. Roman Candle and the two indie records that followed- Elliott Smith and his breakthrough, Either/Or-became talismans for Portland's basement-dwelling creative class, "cheat sheets for comprehending every Rose City songwriter who ever wrestled with a four-track recorder in his or her bedroom," as John Graham wrote in WW after Smith's death. "I'd been listening to a lot of Nick Drake and Tim Hardin," he says, "and I was like, 'Fuck, that's right in there.'" Crane's opinion changed after hearing Roman Candle. The album caught people by surprise: Jackpot Recording Studio owner Larry Crane, who'd go on to oversee several Smith recording sessions and serve as his archivist, had written off Smith for his involvement in Heatmiser, which he lumped in with the "loud, stupid guitar bands" he was tiring of.
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Listening now, it's as if you have an ear cupped against the basement door. Recorded at his girlfriend's house at Southeast Taylor Street and 29th Avenue, it featured little more than acoustic guitar and Smith's barely-there voice.
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Roman Candle, released on upstart Portland label Cavity Search in July 1994, was, in contrast to Heatmiser's roaring sound, almost invasively intimate. Later, Smith would credit his time in the band with teaching him "a lot of things I don't want to do musically." "Once he started recording his solo stuff, that was so much quieter, he realized his voice was much better suited to music that was less aggressive and had more space in it," says Heatmiser drummer Tony Lash.