Elliott Smith, Floating Back to Musical Freedom

OK, strike the Oscars set--it’s back to reality for Elliott Smith. And he couldn’t be happier about it.

“On the last record, I don’t know, it just got so weird because of other extraneous happenings,” the acclaimed singer-songwriter said this week as he prepared for his show Thursday at the Roxy. “This movie stuff that started going on in the middle of recording, it was kind of distracting to say the least.”

“This movie stuff” was a career opportunity that fell into the cult hero’s lap when director Gus Van Sant peppered “Good Will Hunting” with fellow Portland resident Smith’s songs. Nominated for an Academy Award for “Miss Misery,” the rumpled troubadour found himself in the glittering company of Celine Dion, Michael Bolton and Trisha Yearwood, performing his tune on the 1998 awards telecast.

Smith didn’t take home an Oscar, but the episode set the stage for the subsequent release of his major-label debut album, “XO,” on DreamWorks. Though it sold like a cult hero’s record (only around 150,000 to date), the album moved him from the indie-rock niche into the critical mainstream. It finished No. 5 in the bellwether Village Voice critics’ poll, positioning Smith as the artist who would merge the venerable singer-songwriter tradition with a post-Gen X sensibility.

Not a monumental move from the outside, maybe, but it shook things up for the shy, soft-spoken artist.

“It’s the difference between your friend taking a picture of you just to remember that time and someone taking your picture to publish it somewhere,” he said during an interview at his manager’s Silver Lake home. “It’s kind of unnerving in a way. . . . You can kind of feel the outside world more. . . . It was kind of exciting for a while and it was kind of a bummer for a while, and now it just seems like a long time ago.

“I’m not the most introspective person in the world, but I am used to my internal musical landscape being unpeopled, and for a while there were lots of people camping out in there. It seemed kind of crowded. It wasn’t bad, it was just weird.

“Now I’m kind of in a place where I feel free to do whatever comes up musically. There’s not as much focus on one bizarre event in my life, like the Oscars were. . . . So I’m just kind of floating along now, seeing what happens to float up next to me.”

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At the Roxy on Thursday, Smith unveiled some of that flotsam, singing several songs from his new album, “Figure 8,” which comes out April 18. Between shouts for favorites from his early, independent albums, the fiercely devoted audience listened raptly and then roared their approval to Smith’s latest dispatches from his ongoing expedition into the emotional badlands.

Expanding on the methodology that first established him, new compositions such as “Somebody That I Used to Know” and “Easy Way Out” use Smith’s ebb-and-flow melodies and vulnerable, angelic voice to trace the details of deception and betrayal--both internal and between friends and lovers.

The show opened a brief solo, acoustic U.S. tour, but when Smith performs later this year it will be with a full band. That’s a must, given the nature of “Figure 8.” The album’s rich sound relocates Smith from the spare realm of confessional folkie to that of ambitious record-maker in the tradition of the Beatles, Brian Wilson and other symphonic pop pacesetters.

The album’s dynamic range goes from simple guitar and piano accompaniment on the haunting, intimate numbers to atmospheric string orchestrations to stinging folk-rock. These elements often meet in bracing, unpredictable fashion--a reflection of Smith’s intuitive approach in the studio. His higher profile has made him even more determined to experiment.

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“It seems like it’s more important to, given that state of affairs,” he said. “It seems like it would be easy to get locked into a kind of safe mode of, well, maybe if people are looking at me then maybe I’d better not do anything too--like if you walk into a room and feel like people are looking at you, then you don’t want to crack a joke or something or act weird. But then it’s kind of more important to crack a joke.

“It’s definitely too boring to just do stuff that you know for a fact you can do.”

“Figure 8” figures to return Smith to the year-end best-of lists, and its distance from the minimalism of his earlier records might even translate to some receptivity from radio.

So Smith is bracing himself for the return of the attention by keeping his own attention on the place where he’s most comfortable.

“If I don’t stay focused on the actual songs, then my brain just kind of shuts down, ‘cause it doesn’t really like investigating certain things too much,” he said. “I’m happy if people like it, but I still like to keep the little internal landscape kind of free and clear.

“You know, I’m just happy when I’m thinking about new songs. That’s kind of where it’s at for me. I hate getting bogged down in the outward aspects of my music.”