Vic Chesnutt
Is the Actor Happy?

What destabilized me emotionally the most (and still destabilizes me) about the figure of Vic Chesnutt, a little man with a goblin-like look and a voice insecure and slurred by alcohol hailing from Georgia, was his maniacal self-pity. While most of the great singers of existential dramas have indeed tried, through song, to exorcise, coldly and detachedly, their pain, Vic Chesnutt inflicted more pain with sharp sarcasm on his depression, on his excessive use of drugs and alcohol ("Drunk", his third work, was recorded almost entirely while intoxicated) and even on his paraplegia. In his first albums, produced by Michael Stipe, reigned a claustrophobic and cruel solipsism: the feelings were sung in a painful and deliberately theatrical manner, akin to how Blind Lemon Jefferson sang them almost a century earlier. He shared the same ailment as Daniel Johnston but, unlike the latter, was a prisoner of his mental lucidity, as well as of a wheelchair.

"Is the Actor Happy?", his fourth album, represents a temporary exit from this tunnel of loneliness. For the singer-songwriter from Jacksonville, Georgia, a season of commercial successes began, albeit not sensational, and of prominent artistic collaborations (Lambchop, Bill Frisell, Van Dyke Parks, and Bob Mould, among the most famous). The following year, a tribute album was even released featuring big names in the music business such as Soul Asylum, R.E.M., Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, and even Madonna performing his songs. But if you listen to the melodies, exquisitely country-pop, of "Gravity of the Situation" or the splendid electric refrain of "Strange Language", it becomes immediately clear why he had won everyone over so suddenly and unexpectedly. In this work, part of his communicative urgency is sacrificed in favor of a newfound awareness of his means as a musician and "artisan" of the song. Indeed, if the soft ballad of "Doubting Woman" and the airy folk-rock of "Onion Soup" suggest an overcoming of this existential crisis, the desperate blues (see above under "Blind Lemon Jefferson") of "Free of Hope" and the sinister "Thumbtack" hark back to the early Vic Chesnutt, the depressed and lonely one. "Guilty by Association", instead, tinged with strings and chamber atmospheres, on one hand definitively demonstrates how much he has grown as a composer and on the other preludes to his most experimental period, which sees him collaborating with musicians like Silver Mt. Zion and Guy Picciotto and producing masterpieces like "North Star Deserter", perhaps his artistic zenith, and the final requiem of "At the Cut".

But success is, always, a foolish and ephemeral thing, and does not comfort any soul, not even one like Vic Chesnutt, who managed to transform the pathetic into poetic. The question contained in the title of this album, now, after his death from an overdose of painkillers last Christmas, becomes rhetorical. And it leaves one speechless.

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Besides being one of the most important songwriters of the last two decades, he was a poet, a great connoisseur of jazz music (Chet Baker was his favorite artist), and an activist for medical marijuana.

Farewell, James Victor "Vic" Chesnutt (12/11/64 - 25/12/09)