Brad Mehldau Illuminates Elliott Smith’s Shadows on "Ride Into the Sun"

Brad Mehldau – Ride Into the Sun

Album Review – 10/10

Brad Mehldau has never been afraid of crossing musical borders. Over the past three decades, he’s redefined what a jazz pianist can be—moving effortlessly from Cole Porter to Radiohead, from Bach to Bowie. But with Ride Into the Sun, Mehldau has delivered perhaps his most daring and profoundly moving work yet: a full-hearted exploration of Elliott Smith’s songbook, refracted through the prism of jazz harmony, chamber textures, and deep emotional resonance.

This album is far more than a tribute. It is a dialogue between two artists—Smith and Mehldau—who share a fascination with beauty in the shadows, with how pain can yield luminous art.

Concept and Execution

At first glance, the pairing of Brad Mehldau and Elliott Smith might seem unexpected. Smith, the fragile bard of late-’90s indie melancholy, is remembered for his hushed vocals and knife’s-edge harmonic turns; Mehldau, for his expansive improvisational voice and intellectual rigor. But Ride Into the Sun reveals just how deeply the two align.

Across sixteen tracks—ten Smith interpretations, four original Mehldau compositions, plus renditions of Nick Drake’s Sunday and Big Star’s Thirteen—Mehldau traces a lineage of visionary, troubled songwriters whose work hovers between darkness and light. The result is a seamless tapestry: reverent, yet forward-looking.

The Sound

From the opening notes, it’s clear this isn’t simply a piano-and-voice homage. Mehldau’s arrangements are alive with detail: chamber strings that whisper rather than weep, subtle rhythmic pulses from drummer Matt Chamberlain, and crystalline guitar textures from Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen. Chris Thile’s vocals and mandolin on Colorbars inject a haunting, spectral quality.

Mehldau himself is in sublime form. On Tomorrow Tomorrow, he extends Smith’s already unpredictable harmonic palette into a cascading solo that feels inevitable, as if Smith had simply left the door ajar for Mehldau to walk through. On Waltz #1, Mehldau lets silence and resonance do as much work as melody, drawing out the ache at the center of Smith’s writing.

What astonishes is how organically Mehldau’s four originals sit alongside Smith’s pieces. Works like Visionary Depressive feel like they could have been hidden sketches from Smith’s notebook—yet they carry Mehldau’s unmistakable touch. It is homage elevated to conversation.

Emotional Weight

Elliott Smith’s songs are famously steeped in melancholy, but Mehldau finds something else: solace. Where Smith’s originals often teetered on collapse, Mehldau infuses them with a groundedness, a warmth that doesn’t erase the pain but contextualizes it. This duality—fragile and resilient, somber yet luminous—gives the album its extraordinary depth.

The inclusion of Nick Drake’s Sunday and Big Star’s Thirteen serves as gentle bookends, situating Smith in a lineage of lost visionaries whose songs continue to glow decades after their creation. Mehldau makes them all sound like chapters of the same story.

Final Verdict

With Ride Into the Sun, Brad Mehldau has crafted a masterpiece that transcends tribute. It is at once an act of reverence and radical reinterpretation—one that expands Elliott Smith’s universe while honoring its core fragility. Few albums manage to feel this intimate yet this expansive, this rooted in one artist’s world yet unmistakably stamped with another’s genius.

This is more than an album—it’s an act of communion. And it deserves to be recognized as one of the most moving, ambitious, and successful projects of Mehldau’s career.

Rating: 10/10 – A flawless fusion of jazz imagination and songwriter intimacy.