Here's a look at the late Vic Chesnutt's life and work--
an idiosyncratic blend of folk, art-rock, and country.
©Pitchfork
Listen to this wonderful live performance on Tiny Desk...and read on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8vsSQEAGnA
In October, just two months before his death on Christmas Day, I interviewed Vic Chesnutt about his latest album, At the Cut, and his then-current tour with members of Fugazi and Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra. I opened the conversation with an icebreaker about the collection and the general impression he wanted to convey through it: "That I'm a f#ckin' MONSTER!!!!" was his spirited reply. It was my mistake, asking a stock question of an artist who is anything but stock. In his nearly 20-year career, the Georgia native has been an unfailingly unique and ornery songwriter who has over time chucked his limitations and written and re-written his own rules as he went along.
Throughout our interview, he had trouble explaining his own music, not because he was disengaged or disingenuous but because he felt the songs themselves said everything he needed to say, so why bother discussing them further? Why dispel the mystery or explain the art? He did finally reveal that his new band was the best band there could ever be and that the album is all about inspiration: "'Philip Guston' was inspired by Philip Guston. 'Chain' was inspired by Jem Cohen's movie Chain. 'Chinaberry Tree' was inspired by an off-handed remark by my father-in-law. I wanted to show in the lyrics sheet where some of these ideas came from. I wanted to illustrate about inspiration. That's why the cover's inside the Met. It's all very appropriate."
Since releasing his first album, Little, in 1990, Chesnutt never seemed at a loss for inspiration. He released 13 albums under his own name, along with one album as Dark Developments (with Elf Power and the Amorphous Strums) and two as brute. (with members of Widespread Panic). He was a serial collaborator: Each album introduced new partners in crime who introduced new sounds and ideas into Chesnutt's repertoire, creating piecemeal a highly diverse and accomplished catalog featuring Michael Stipe (who produced his first two albums), Lambchop, Van Dyke Parks, Kelly and Nikki Keneipp, Bill Frisell, and Jonathan Richman.
Despite his gregarious recording habits, Chesnutt often came across as a ****ing MONSTER, if only toward himself. Both as author and character, he is inescapably the subject of his songs, and his is the one perspective he could never escape. Countering dark subjects with darker humor, his chagrined albums comprise an autobiography in song, recounting a storied life, documenting strained relationships, and evoking perilous despair. Arguably the defining moment of his life-- or at least his career-- occurred in 1983, when Chesnutt was in a car accident. Already the 18-year-old budding musician was harboring intense depression and suicidal thoughts, and the accident left him with a broken neck. For the rest of his life he was confined to a wheelchair, still able to play guitar and make the scribbly sketches that would later adorn his albums. After moving to Athens in the mid 1980s, he began a weekly residency at the 40 Watt Club, writing songs about friends, acquaintances, or people in the audience. Little, which Chesnutt and Stipe recorded in one quick, casual session, recounts his southern childhood in careful and often chilling detail, whether he's watching "Speed Racer" on TV or building rabbit traps out in the woods near his home. Such bittersweet memories colored his songwriting for years, most memorably in "Panic Pure", a standout track from his second album, West of Rome:
My earliest memory is of holding up a sparkler
High up to the darkest sky
Some Fourth of July spectacular
I shook it with an urgency
I'll never ever be able to repeat.
In 1996, Chesnutt was the subject of a tribute album, Sweet Relief II, featuring Cracker, R.E.M., Sparklehorse, and, most memorably, Mary Margaret O'Hara covering his songs. It introduced the singer to a new audience and also revealed the extent of his medical bills. When he died, he was more than $70,000 in debt, which he claimed prevented him from receiving crucial treatment. It's unclear how these things contributed to his death.
There's a prickly physicality to his lyrics, which often referred implicitly to his medical conditions. On "Supernatural", from 1993's Drunk, he describes an out-of-body experience that transforms the medical into the mystical: "I flew around the hospital room once on intravenous Demerol, it weren't supernatural." His music was full of similarly odd textures: His reedy, wry voice could float up into a buoyant falsetto or descend into a menacing grumble, and he mangled his pronunciation and meter playfully, drawing out syllables to make familiar words sound wholly new. He has been celebrated as a singer and songwriter, but Chesnutt was also a shrewd guitarist with a similarly squirrely style. Because he lost some movement in his hands after the accident, he picked out his notes with what sounds like a slight hesitation, putting them just askew of the beat and giving songs like "Withering" and "When the Bottom Fell Out" their uneasy pace.
Chesnutt's music was an idiosyncratic blend of folk, art-rock, and country, but the darkness of his songs was never an expectation of style or a genre accessory. Rather, it was the consequence of simply being Vic Chesnutt. He let loose all of his demons into his songs, which aren't confessional as much as they are self-reckoning, but he let more light into later songs, which sound more gracious and poignant within the framework of his career. Consider "Flirted With You All My Life", a track from At the Cut which has become something of an epitaph in the past few weeks, quoted in numerous obituaries:
When you touched a friend of mine
I thought I would lose my mind
But I found out with time
That really, I was not ready
O Death... I'm not ready
The tragic irony of "Flirted With You All My Life" is that Chesnutt died so soon after writing those lines. There is, however, no comfort in that song; he is neither coming to terms with death nor is revealing a new appreciation for life. Instead, he is simply ruminating fearfully of the monstrous finality of death and the unbearable enormity of oblivion. That he could parse his meaning so finely in just a few words made his voice unique and his death all the more tragic: "Flirted With You All My Life" sounds like a middle chapter, not the end of the story.
...............
Whenever an artist dies, there's an impulse to sum up his life in one overarching story, a single guiding narrative line that connects everything he ever did. Chesnutt was far too complex for that, his catalog too deep and idiosyncratic. As an antidote, below are 15 essential songs from throughout his long career, which form not only a retrospective but also show the diversity of his output and the breadth of his accomplishments.
1. "Isadora Duncan" [Little; 1990]
The first song off Chesnutt's first album sets the tone for every note that would come after: the creeky voice and the askew phrasing, the loping guitar, the odd imagery. Michael Stipe, who produced this debut and Chesnutt's follow-up, reinforces the dreamlike aspect of the lyrics with a closely mic'ed intimacy as Chesnutt describes an encounter with the famous dancer of the title. That it's a wheelchair-bound singer dreaming of dancing only underscores the song's poignancy.
2. "Speed Racer" [Little; 1990]
The Japanese cartoon becomes an entry point for a discussion of Chesnutt's atheism, which he says developed when he was a young teenager. "I can dodge the thunderbolts and scratch out an existence on this glorious but simple plane" was his metaphysical mission statement, married to one of his most demonstrative choruses.
3. "Panic Pure" [West of Rome; 1991]
Perhaps the quintessential Chesnutt song, "Panic Pure" begins with a cloudy memory of childhood and progresses into a screed against the scrutiny of critics and listeners. On their own, the lyrics sting, but Chesnutt's stumbling performance-- drawing out his vowels ominously, rushing or slowing his phrasing-- only reinforces his ornery introspection.
4. "Florida" [West of Rome; 1991]
Chesnutt reportedly attempted suicide several times and wrote about those urges frequently. Nowhere is the idea of death more poignant than in this hymnlike ode to the "redneck Riviera," which he describes as the most pathetic place in America and therefore the ideal place to take one's life. Listen for his gorgeously halting guitar solo after the first verse.
5. "Supernatural" [Drunk; 1993]
Chesnutt never met a word he couldn't mispronounce to sound new, offputting, even sinister. With its fluttering guitars and dark intimations of astral projection and déjà vu, "Supernatural" indulges subject/verb disagreement ("it weren't supernatural") and willful distortions to make the mundane seem overwhelmingly mysterious.
6. "Onion Soup" [Is the Actor Happy?; 1995]
The precarious grip of friendship is the subject of this epistolary song, whose bleak subject matter-- the increasing estrangement of pen-pals-- belies its buoyant momentum and sunny disposition. That guitar riff sounds like a long walk down a country road, and his circular melody culminates in one of his loveliest, funniest, and saddest refrains.
7. "Free of Hope" [Is the Actor Happy?; 1995]
As a songwriter, Chesnutt often seemed more beholden to literary rather than musical influences. Faulknerian in its intense southern gothic imagery and its implied story of a family in decadent disrepair, "Free of Hope" begins with an inscrutable opening line that makes no logical sense but just feels true and brutal.
8. "Good Morning Mr. Hard On" [Nine High a Pallet; 1995]
Chesnutt recorded two full-lengths as brute. with members of the Georgia jamband Widespread Panic, who added some Southern boogie to his oddball tales. The best of the lot is a paean to his penis. "What's the big to-do," he asks himself. "Why the stiffy salute?"
9. "New Town" [About to Choke; 1996]
The 1996 tribute album Sweet Relief II introduced Chesnutt to a wider audience, and he winked at the opportunity with the title of his major-label follow-up, About to Choke. That album may have lived up to its title, but "New Town" remains one of his cleverest compositions, thanks to the insistent repetition of its catchy melody as well as its persistent ambiguity: In describing such a bucolic setting, he never makes clear whether he's cheering the town's idealism or parodying its pipe dreams.
10. "Duty Free" [The Salesman and Bernadette; 1998]
For his 1998 album, Chesnutt teamed with Nashville freak-country collective Lambchop, who provide warm, sophisticated accompaniment for his third-person tales of title characters, who bare the brunt of his projected worries. "Duty Free" combines the gravity of a Dixieland funeral march with the whimsy of an old Disney score. With so many people backing him, Chesnutt cleans up his vocals, delivering a somewhat straightforward performance, but rather than dilute his eccentricities, he only proves that he could transcend them.
11. "Band Camp" [Silver Lake; 2003]
For his debut for New West Records, Chesnutt worked with producer Mark Howard and a crew of session musicians to create his most polished album. The stand-out is "Band Camp", an energetically performed, bittersweetly remembered tale of a wild-spirited high school girl who vamped during band rehearsals and soaked her tampons in vodka. That she settles down and becomes life-size is the song's heartbreaking twist.
12. "Everything I Say" [North Star Deserter; 2007]
Chesnutt signed with Constellation Records and recorded his tenth album with an ad hoc band featuring Fugazi's Guy Picciotto and members of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra. The result was another departure in a career of many: "Everything I Say" is one of the hardest and heaviest songs Chesnutt ever recorded, fluctuating between the spare verse and the explosive chorus. It's a new idea for him, but one that manifests his inner turmoil remarkably well.
13. "Bilocating Dog" [Dark Developments; 2008]
It was only a matter of time before Chesnutt got around to recording with fellow Athens mainstays Elf Power. Dark Developments, which also included locals the Amorphous Strums, is a loose, rambling album that alternately spins yarns and spits election-year venom. "Bilocating Dog" is one of Chesnutt's goofiest compositions in years, made even weirder by the band's backing vocals and the warped doo-wop coda.
14. "Chinaberry Tree" [At the Cut; 2009]
When Chesnutt reconvened the band from North Star Deserter for a second album together, they were old friends rather than new acquaintances. And their familiarity with each other is evident throughout At the Cut, which melds his lyrics to their dramatic arrangements. Picciotto's guitar slices through "Chinaberry Tree", as Chesnutt sings about "the meanest chinaberry tree that has ever been" with palpable desperation in his voice. One of his greatest strengths was to turn the mundane into the epic, and here a little yardwork becomes a grueling spiritual struggle.
15. "Flirted With You All My Life" [At the Cut; 2009]
In interviews Chesnutt has described this song as a break-up with the idea of suicide, but the most telling part of the song isn't the quote that appears in most of his obits, but the final, harrowing lines describing his mother's death from cancer: "She fought but then succumbed to it, but you made her beg for it. 'O Jesus, I am ready.'"
That the melody is so lovely and unforced only underscores the loss he felt then and the loss we feel now.
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music".
-Aldous Huxley
