Vic Chesnutt likes a little ambiguity in his poetic lyrics
by Joe Tarr
A song by Vic Chesnutt is often something of a mystery. The singer-songwriter from Athens, Ga., gives us evocative lines and details—a sparkler held up to the darkest sky, "a hotel full of Pakistanis," or "all the little loonies with a salient obsession"—but lets the listener piece it all together.
This technique doesn't lead to exasperation so much as intrigue. The songs simmer in your head as you try to solve their puzzle. It's led to a number of after-show conversations as fans ask him to explain his songs.
"Sometimes I tell them what I think, sometimes I let them think what they want. Sometimes the ambiguity—I like the way that it challenges. We write the song together. I rely on their imagination to make the song interesting. Their interpretation is always valid," says Chesnutt, as he gives directions to his driver on his way to a show in Birmingham, Ala. He'll be performing at the Pilot Light in support of his eleventh album, Silver Lake.
Chesnutt writes the kind of songs that are often compared to the perennial writings of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Labeled Southern Gothic, his narratives are populated with drunks, depressives, divorcees, troubled kids, and hopeless romantics.
Raised in Georgia, Chesnutt's tunes are also filled with images that ground him in the South.
He tosses off lines like "I settled down on a hurt as big as Robert Mitchum/ And listened to Lucinda Williams" and has penned a devastatingly accurate theme song for Florida, in which he sings, "I respect a man who goes to where he wants to be/ Even if he wants to be dead... Florida, Florida, there's no more perfect place to retire from life."
But in this age of globalization, can anything really be called Southern or parochial?
Chesnutt isn't sure. "There's many Southernisms in my songs, colloquialisms, and sometimes quite a few Southern images," Chesnutt says. "It's hard for me to know if you took the South out of me what I would be. That's all I know. It's where I grew up. I don't know how much influence place has on me. If I was from California, how much influence would that have on me?"
Whether it's accurate or not, Chesnutt has become a kind of troubadour of the South, as much a spokesman for the region as Lucinda Williams and fellow Athens residents, Drive-by Truckers.
Born in Florida before his family moved to Georgia, music had always been a part of Chesnutt's life. He wrote his first song at the age of 5 and as a teenager he played trumpet in a cover band and later played rhythm guitar for a newwave group.
But it was an unfortunate event that led Chesnutt toward a more serious writing path. He got drunk and drove his truck into a ditch at the age of 18, an accident that left him bound to a wheelchair.
After the accident, Chesnutt started reading more, famously shoplifting a Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, which introduced him to the likes of Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden and others.
The accident destroyed his ability to play trumpet, but Chesnutt could still strum guitar and play keyboards. He started writing songs that "take on adult form," as he wryly puts it on his bio. He moved to Athens in the mid-'80s, where he became a popular opening solo act and got a regular gig at the famed 40 Watt Club.
He also met Michael Stipe of R.E.M., who produced Chesnutt's first two albums, Little and West of Rome in the early '90s. A 1996 tribute album, Sweet Relief II; the Gravity of the Situation (featuring R.E.M., Nancy Griffith, Soul Asylum, Joe Henry, and others performing his songs), helped Chesnutt reach a broader audience.
Chesnutt says his writing was affected a great deal by Faulkner and O'Connor. "The thing I like about those two is the sort of tragedy. I'm kind of fascinated with the tragic and the down-and-out. And this kind of local reverberating through the universe," he says. "That had a big influence, thinking that the very local can have big universal reverberations."
"When I read Faulkner, it makes me hungry to write."
Good lyrics don't necessarily equal good poetry, but many of Chesnutt's lyrics are as luscious read or spoken as they are sung to a melody. "Out of body experience/ I flew around the little room once/ On intravenous Demerol/ It weren't supernatural," he sings on "Supernatural." Or from "Panic Pure": And so all you observers in your scrutiny/ don't count my scars like tree rings/ My jigsaw disposition, its piecemeal properties/ are either smoked or honey cured by the panic pure.
Chesnutt divides his songs into three categories: short stories, poems, and slogans. "Some songs of mine use personal mythology and poetic devices to kind of evoke a certain emotional and intellectual response. Others are more narrative," he says. "There's a lot of ambiguity in a lot of my songs."
In the short story group, many of the songs are open-ended.
From this year's Silver Lake, the cryptic "Band Camp" suggests a life with a drastic turn, without ever saying whether it was good or bad. It's about a heavy-drinking girl from high school who befriends a younger boy, the song's narrator. The song closes with him singing, "I didn't go to your graduation/ I just couldn't find the strength/ and I had to throw my yearbook in the dumpster/ because it was haunting me/ the very next time I ever laid eyes on you/ you already looked like a whole different person."
"It's based on actual events of my high school experience. But it's all fictional. Where the song ends that's the extent of the involvement with that character. What happened after is anybody's guess," he says.
"Some people have had a hard time figuring out what that song is about," he says. "The narrator has a crush on this person, this wild chick, then this wild chick graduates from high school and in the course from summer to autumn, this person turns into an adult. The narrator has a hard time dealing with that."
Other songs are more straightforward, using a goofy wordplay and a dry sense of humor.
Silver Lake's "Girls Say" is a he-said, she-said conversation: "yes and girls say, 'you look great today'/ and boys say 'hey, show me your boobs.'"
Recorded in The Paramour, an 80-year-old mansion above the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, Silver Lake is more produced than most of Chesnutt's records. "I wanted to make an over-produced monstrosity of an orchestra record," he says.
But instead, the album ended up being more of a live recording, with the band making several takes of each song and the best recording selected. "It wasn't my idea for a record. It was the producer [Mark Howard] who wanted to record it like that."
"It's a pretty organic little record we made. With the band I had on the record, we brainstormed and jammed around and figured out what kind of arrangements we wanted to use," he says.
Chesnutt's live shows can be mesmerizing affairs. He last played in Knoxville a few years ago, opening for Wilco at the Tennessee Theatre.
"I like Knoxville. I like it because of the mountains there, the river, and then this rustbelt look with all the old factories. It's a pretty cool looking town," he says.
Sort of like a scene from one of his songs.
June 26, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 26
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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