Chesnutt’s musical worldview could be remarkably bleak even the blissful innocence of childhood couldn’t last forever. His albums are littered with characters whose little dramas we can recognize as our own and take consolation in. Life is often portrayed as painfully transient at best in a Vic Chesnutt song. Yes the world, world, world it is a sponge He saw the minute details about the world that most of us cannot or have been conditioned to ignore: In Chesnutt’s songs life was presented in startling detail a bizarre, fragile and occasionally humorous world came alive in a Vic Chesnutt song. His lyrics could paint pictures more vividly and believably than any painter’s canvass his songs were undeniably poetic. At their best they told us something about the beauty and tragedy of life, about companionship and isolation, about hope and hopelessness. But the musician’s work went far beyond that simplistic characterization his songs could be cruel, comforting, comical and caustic all at once. Certainly Chesnutt spent much of his musical, and one imagines, private life confronting the types of questions about mortality many of us would prefer to keep at a safe distance. Most of the obituaries that have been written thus far have invariably typecast Chesnutt as a humorless and death-obsessed Southern folkie. “Florida,” written as an elegy for a friend who killed himself, now sounds even more chilling:Ī man must take his life in his own handsĪnd I respect a man who goes to where he wants to be In various interviews he acknowledged several previous suicide attempts with a disarming degree of candor “ I flirted with you all my life/ Even kissed you once or twice” is how he addressed the subject on At The Cut. Suicide was never a stranger in the singer’s life or his songs.
Best vic chesnutt songs cracked#
Chesnutt always seemed older than his years and living on borrowed time: the cracked voice those loosely-fitting clothes that suggested he was nothing but bones underneath them the wheelchair and the limitations they imposed on him. It’s the news that we have been dreading and perhaps expecting for years: Vic Chesnutt is dead, most likely by suicide. Today we will publish a tribute to the artist who died on Christmas, Wednesday will be a review of a show he played a few weeks before his death and on Thursday an unpublished interview conducted last year where he spoke about his first album Little. We are dedicating this week to the passing of Vic Chesnutt.