The songs were still recognizably his—you could strip them back to just acoustic guitar, as he often did live, and they fit neatly alongside his earlier material. But glorious new sounds welled up everywhere: the Mellotron that turned the chorus of “Bottle Up and Explode!” sunset-pink; the bass saxophone honking its way through on “A Question Mark”; the George Harrison-style acoustic slide guitar on “Oh Well, OK” or the “Getting Better” guitar chimes of “Baby Britain.” On album opener “Sweet Adeline,” he even indulged in some Dorothy-enters-Oz playfulness—for a full minute and a half, the song resembles a slightly cleaner, crisper, take on the hyper-intimate folk of his previous records. But then, just as the lyrics land on the title phrase, Smith’s voice reaches for a new, louder register, and then—what’s this?—a full band crashes in, complete with huge, pounding “When the Levee Breaks”-style John Bonham drum hits and multi-tracked vocal harmonies, all of them recognizably Smith. His songs had been a lot of things—lucid, tender, angry, brilliantly constructed—but they had never before been showy.
Smith moved from instrument to instrument in the studio with the laser focus of someone possessed, testing songs out songs in different registers, keys, and arrangements. On day one of recording, he demoed and finalized a sickly, twirling lullaby in 3/4 time that he just called “Waltz #1.” He’d written it after listening to Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” on mushrooms for 18 straight hours. Foggy, staggering, and fragile, the song never breaks from its simple rhythm but seems to exist in a world outside meter. There might be no more naked moment in his catalog than the tipsy stagger up the Db-major scale to his pleading line, “What was I supposed to say?”
The other, more famous song on XO with the word “Waltz” in its title also explored childlike feelings of fear and helplessness. Something about 3/4 time seemed to stir primal feelings in Smith, and he returned to the time signature whenever he found himself staring into the dark pool that waited in his subconscious memories of childhood in Cedar Hill, Texas. Maybe it was a method of self-soothing, a sort of musical EMDR that allowed him to revisit the childhood ghosts that never entirely left him. But “Waltz #2,” Smith’s lead single, deals rather conspicuously with the troubled dynamic that Smith observed between his stepfather, Charlie Welch, and his mother, Bunny.
The song is set in a karaoke bar, the characters a man and wife taking turns on the stage. The woman selects “Cathy’s Clown” (”Don’tcha think it’s kinda sad/That you’re treating me so bad?”), while the man returns the message, with a vengeance, choosing “You’re No Good.” “Waltz #2” is a song about people singing subtext-loaded songs to each other. It is also, itself, loaded with subtext. Smith wasn’t typically eager to encourage biographical readings of his songs, but in live performances he seemed to have no compunction about making this subtext clear, subbing the sign-off lyric “XO mom” with the plainly sung “I love you, mom.” For this song, at least, there was no alternate reading.
