Vic Chesnutt: At the Cut

I remember the first time I read about Vic Chesnutt. It was a couple of years ago, around the time it was announced that he would be releasing an album on Montreal’s Constellation label, called North Star Deserter.

This is how I heard about him, but there have been numerous junctures in the man’s twenty year plus career where collaborations with (or just the attentions of) notable artists have likely ushered in a new batch of fans to this man's musical world. Fellow Atlanta resident Michael Stipe’s “spotting” of and recording of his first two records in the early nineties. A tribute album featuring Kristin Hersh, R.E.M. and The Smashing Pumpkins coming just six years after his debut. Lambchop backing him up in the studio in the late nineties. Work with legendary guitarist Bill Frisell and composer Van Dyke Parks and soon to be released work with the magnificent eccentric Jonathan Richman.

The list goes on, as does Vic Chesnutt’s firmly rooted position in what we call the underground, what perhaps brings the mantle of songwriter’s songwriter upon him. I assume that his sales have never matched the critical and creative interest and I imagine he is all the better for it. Or perhaps his fans are at least...

It has been widely noted that he rarely repeats these collaborations, so his choice to return to the Hotel2Tango (the home and hub of Constellation releases) to record again with members of A Silver Mt Zion and Guy Picciotto of Fugazi suggests that Chesnutt has found a rich songwriting vein that is still yielding results. He declares this and elaborates upon it in a fine interview with Aquarium Drunkard, which you can find here.

My general reaction to this record is that I would like to hear it performed. In the aforementioned interview he describes the sonic force of the unit as “a locomotive” rightly asserting that “The decibel volume alone is like riding on a jet, a soaring jet or something”. That being said, this record is not that loud. It starts out that way with ‘Coward’, which sounds much like a Mt Zion track with its loping, thunderous apocalypse and despairing appraisals of personal weaknesses, but elsewhere the volume is exhibited in numerous controlled explosions rather than raw power. Although I never got myself a copy of North Star Deserter I did listen to it round at a friends place and if memory serves there were a handful more of these clanging blooms on that album.

‘Chinaberry Tree’ finds Chesnutt sounding positively let loose and flying atop the two scrawling, scrappy guitar lines. Knowing that he pens most of these tunes alone on an acoustic guitar before settling down with the musicians elucidates how well this particular song made its effective transition. I get the impression that it started out as a relatively delicate and fragile ballad, with Chesnutt “going at the Chinaberry Tree” with a machete. The tense guitars pull the wires taught, allowing Chesnutt to float above a nervous electric storm. But the power invested by the others does not stamp the fragility down, it magnifies it.

Thematically I haven’t formed what you might call a full understanding, but the man has an ability to write a song which can be appreciated on more than one level, rendering the idea of a full understanding rather redundant when open-endedness is the aim. A species that is considered invasive in the songwriter’s home state, and whose fruit is poisonous enough to kill a human if eaten in quantity, the “biggest” and alternately “meanest” Chinaberry Tree that he has “ever seen” has been identified as a mortal foe.

When Chesnutt tells us he has hurled himself repeatedly “at the cut”, the wider implications of violently removing and deposing an invading force or growth sprout forth without being clearly stated. Admittedly I can’t deduce all of his lyrics here, but while appearing metaphoric the song also illuminates the conceptual thinking employed by us humans to invoke a spiritual or warlike purpose in aid of completing what might be a simple gardening task.

He gave me this impression with the early line I hear as “all the key players are watching me, through their simian group-think”. It’s an intriguing, rousing and epitaphic song, but for all it’s intricacies I can’t say it has reached me. Perhaps this is due to the bands eagerness to play their hand early; perhaps it’s just that I’m not a big fan of his voice.

The sparse and intimate ‘When The Bottom Fell Out’ recalls North Star closer ‘Rattle’, but heavier on the melancholy and lighter on the humour. Elsewhere there’s a lot of jazzy brush drumming and plodding double bass. It bores me on ‘We Hovered With Short Wings’ and captures my imagination on the light and airy drift of ‘It is What it is’ which has some understated and beautiful chord changes, nice violin work and more than a few neat turns of phrase slotting in relaxed, and smooth while ragged as ever,

“Like the invisible man, directing traffic.

I’d be ineffective, no matter how enthusiastic”

It’s my favourite song on the record, and coincidentally the longest. Later on it bursts out with an openness and a joy which has been brimming throughout the album from both Chesnutt and the band, evident even on the dark suicidal underbelly that rolls over into view on ‘Flirted With You All My Life’. But my attention frequently wanders.

This might be due in part to the freedom the songwriter is feeling, his lyricism skips all over the place. It’s certainly not incoherent, more a consistently enthusiastic scattering of paint that can be alternately wild and intricate. It’s a subtly abstract form of songwriting where he feels content and confident to record verbatim a song that according to him spring from dreamt conversations with his Granny. He doesn’t do what Bill Callahan did recently on ‘Eid Ma Clack Shaw’ where a fragmented dream was rendered within a seemingly obvious metaphorical context; ‘Granny’ seems like authentic stream of (dream) consciousness.

It’s certainly a well crafted and well recorded album; my interest and enjoyment increases the more time I give it, but it doesn’t inspire me. Which takes me back to where I started: I’d still like to see these songs and those from North Star Deserter performed live. Same goes for A Silver Mt Zion really, I’m not that interested in their records, but having seen them play a number of times I am more than aware of the qualities they possess which do not transpose all that well to tape. Like the man said himself, something about a locomotive. I get the impression that when Chesnutt performs (or records for that matter) he gives it his all, and that’s an unfortunately rare quality amongst many contemporary songwriters.