Vic Chesnutt

I'm not an optimist

I'm not a realist

I might be a subrealist

but I can't substantiate

It was bigger than me

and I felt like a sick child

dragged by a donkey

through the myrtle

Not at all at ease. In debt, rather, at fault as always.

It's hard to fully grasp the pit of inadequacy Vic Chesnutt felt he'd sunk into, right when things suddenly started turning for the better.

He was never one for lying low, after all, given that even behind a symbolic act of compensation he could still detect the mark of the most self-serving charity. He wasn't exactly an Olympic champion of polite smiles, perhaps because the harshness of his troubled life had long since stripped him of the polished veneer of conformists. And yet he was a delightful person, funny, and grateful for all the love he genuinely received. He was undoubtedly weighed down by the radiant glance with which the star system caressed him with suspicious generosity, a split second and then gone. Not that Victoria Williams' Sweet Relief was a bad idea in itself. It's just that charity wasn't for him, and on the forthcoming record he'd find a way to say so:

Well, I must admit I'm flattered by your consecration

So tedious, so chilling

and yet moving.

But while you clumsily flatter me

I'll go on keeping the annoyance to myself, for my sake and yours

and I'll leave, I'll stay out all night

under the familiar fluorescent lights of a Dunkin' Donuts

Because, you see, I really don't have time for niceties

Or, rather, I was never all that crazy about them anyway

The previous "Is The Actor Happy?" had proven a valuable surprise. In the space of a couple of years, Vic had managed to sweep his spiritual home clean of the ghosts of the shabbiest self-pity. He'd swept the dust off the floors, stacked up the unflinchingly honest self-portraits of himself made ugly, abandoned or drunk, and consigned them to the flames. His music, too, had revealed unexpected new sides, a pop garland here and there, adding splashes of color to the cramped spaces of his unadorned folk. Everyone loved that record, which in the end didn't betray him. And the people at an industrial giant like Capitol, part of the EMI group, loved it too — the kind of thing enough to make a modest independent artist clinging to his flea-bitten label's head spin.

Intimidated but not showing it, Chesnutt set just one condition to the label offering to change his life: that the album he was signing this contract for be sold in a cardboard sleeve, like all his previous works. It was a fixation he seemed to cling to with willful stubbornness, almost as if it were an antidote to his own fragility, at a time when CDs still arrived in shops strictly in plastic cases. "I hate those cases. They fall and break. And I know a thing or two about what it means to be broken."

He got his wish. And so as not to betray the trust placed in him, and not to snub the good fortune that, for once, chose to knock on his door, he gave it his all. In the year when heavyweights like Madonna, R.E.M. or the Smashing Pumpkins were busy reinterpreting his old songs with princely courtesy, Vic was writing and recording new ones for what would be, by far, his most ambitious LP.

Far removed now from the lo-fi and naive candor of "Little", the still-grand roughness of "West Of Rome" softened, and the jagged despair of "Drunk" perhaps set aside for good. "Is The Actor Happy?" would instead stand as the fixed point on which to steady the helm: essentially a continuation of the sharp autobiographical acumen at the core of the Athens songwriter's work, yet projected into a dimension capable of transcending the marginal significance of his own tormented existentialism, to look beyond it. In this sense, "About To Choke" truly opened up space for deeper, more mature reflection, glimpses previously unthinkable for a promising but abstract songwriter, one never quite grounded in the tangible reality of his time, as Chesnutt had always been. The step forward was enormous, but never outpaced the leg taking it. That's also why Vic chose to keep the same cast and recording studio as its predecessor, bringing in only a couple of session musicians for embellishment and his friend Bob Mould as one of the producers. Overhauling an already solid formula, even with the means to do so, would have been sheer madness for a songwriter as meticulous yet humble as him; working instead to refine its qualities promised far better results. Above all, it ensured he kept a steady course, and his wits about him. That's why the Georgia troubadour largely stuck to the same notes as his previous ballads. He wouldn't have been fully himself if he hadn't once again proven to be the usual master of introspection, the gentle pauperist who all but whispered ("Tarragon").

The starting point remained the same as ever, though amid gentle invective and aching, resolutely skewed intimism, what now stepped into view was a direct, razor-sharp, thoroughly focused storyteller. One who perhaps lingered a little longer on a more pronounced nostalgic streak, but without indulgence or posturing. The rough grain of his accent and that cracked voice of his kept the listener firmly anchored to the earthly dimension, to the material concreteness of the hard-lived experience of a paraplegic artist who, with his battered acoustic guitar, came to resemble - paradox of paradoxes - a tireless walker. A more painful and personal passage could hardly be avoided, even if it was developed from the vantage point of the consummate self-analyst, with an awareness that had been missing until then. "Hot Seat" confronted the same old demons, the temptations of suicide, without filters or cosmetics, relying solely on the sheer power of its words, and on the raw force of his ungainly singing and the spare picking of his nylon strings. Despite this, the album's mood leaned mostly toward the radiant, helped along no small amount by a near-miraculous balance, by the exceptional acoustic guitar interplay, the effective harmonies, and a limpid wonder at work across the board.

A sound far more rounded than in the past, straddling folk and roots rock, made "Giant Sands" an easygoing, band-driven passage, full of drafts, emotional surges and constructive restlessness. The contribution of the small ensemble could not have proved more valuable, arriving with great warmth and involvement within that calm, and this was doubly true in the case of "New Town", a wide-ranging meditation on contemporaneity, shared traditions and community life. No small feat for the introverted Vic, and the perfect occasion to put together an eloquent, affectionate portrait, sketched with genuine attention to the moods and flavors typical of Americana. His was the gaze of a contemplative soul endowed with practical good sense and unsuspected enthusiasm, though always careful to dodge the traps of easy rhetoric and worn-out, fashionable patriotism.

"About To Choke" was a mature, precise, gripping authorial statement, far removed from the drift into the otherwise sincere vignette-sketching of his early work. A verist survey that managed to profitably overtake the merciless, unappealable fatalism of the past, back when the singer would darkly curse the fact that there was no God on whom to unload the full weight of his own mistakes. "Almost choking", after all, was not the same as "Choking", the title the album had claimed just a couple of years earlier. And even the bold choice of that cover photo, softened by the ghostly blur of a carefully long exposure time, was too telling a clue to ignore. Partial retreats against the blackest despair, an amnesty from which everyone stood to benefit, the folksinger and his devoted followers alike. Who would have had every reason to rejoice in finding him returning to certain ascetic folk eccentricities ("Threads") already explored before, and certainly not out of pandering affectation or the calculation of a cynical mannerist. Chesnutt's personality was strong enough to assert itself over any formal device, rendering useless the convenient categories and stereotypes relied upon by those critics who, not by chance, struggled like hell trying to keep up with him - and never quite managed to.

There was no insincere emphasis in "About To Choke", no masks, no theatrical forcing. Just a voice set free in flight from a heart full of holes and scars, yet stronger than ever. Otherwise there would be no explaining, right in the belly of the album, the ironic lightness of "(It's No Secret) Satisfaction" (with its huffing little organs, drum machine, loops and filtered vocal) and above all the pop gem of "Little Vacation", one of the sweetest, most poignant songs of his career and also the first real chance to enjoy the fun of his fake trumpet. The backward-glancing vein that recovered, perhaps for the first time, a certain frivolity of the American sixties, together with the extraordinary performance and that air of festive disenchantment, made it a genuine gem - not the only one - wonderfully summery and full of life. The album's masterpieces, however, Vic would use as a frame, spending all his tokens at once on the singular of his formidable first person. Opening the record, the stream of consciousness of "Myrtle", simple yet surprisingly evocative, intimate and at the same time emblematic of the songwriter's poetics. Minimalism and symbolist poetry fused with the ease and breadth of the greats. The colors of childhood on the canvas of a magical self-portrait. And every single word weighed like the syllabic tiles of a haiku. Then, in the closing track, a return to domestic glimpses, to the fragile friend intent on apologizing for his limits as a communicator, unable to register how insane a joke this seemed, coming from him, so significant always and in any case, even despite himself, perhaps.

For Vic, the record was a degree earned with honors, a moving confession that was never self-pitying.

It was a clean-cut path, but it never earned him a medal.

It wasn't even much talked about, and the opportunity was squandered through no fault of his own. At Capitol they must have thought themselves rather reckless to be promoting that ugly, gloomy-looking guy in a wheelchair, but they wasted no time cutting him loose. He wouldn't have taken it personally - he was going back to his own world after all. The blunt, cruel one that gives nothing away to anyone, the one where hymns of praise are just bedtime stories, so as not to appear too troubled in the face of boundless cynicism.

It would be tough, but he'd manage, accompanied for stretches of the road by friends who were always new and increasingly genuine.

And in the end he would even call himself lucky, honored to have played the lead role in the great novel of his life.

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29/09/2013