Vic Chesnutt

What made Vic Chesnutt a great songwriter? For starters, he didn’t wallop his subjects into the ground with a sledgehammer; with spindly guitar picking and creaky-floorboard singing, he snuck up on a song like “Supernatural,” debunking the paranormal by tossing off small but piercing observations until he got his quarry surrounded. Even when it’s impossible to avoid attention, as on all-star Chesnutt tribute/benefit album Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation — to cover the wheelchair-bound troubadour’s then-continuing medical bills — the guest of honor offered a theme song built around the repeated refrain “humble and gracious.” Listen long enough and it becomes clear that Chesnutt was a master miniaturist and an ace at self-effacement; take “Phil the Fiddler,” a long list of quirky, small-town characters — three guesses who that song’s “boy with the leaky boot” is likely to be.

In Next Steps, lock into the literary side of Chesnutt, from merciless mirror glances to juicy gender wars.

As deceptively casual as Chesnutt’s style might have seem, his songs were overflowing with literary leanings that earned the Georgia-based tunesmith constant comparisons to great Southern poets and novelists. When you realize there’s a Rome in Georgia, it’s easy to wonder whether the corrosive character snapshot “West of Rome” bore a bit of autobiography. This is, after all the same guy whose homespun, harmonica-laced country/folk ballad “The Garden” offered up the observation “the weeds are doing fine.” Most importantly, though, Chesnutt never lost his wry humor: No songwriter has ever painted the battle of the sexes so gleefully graphic and inglorious as he does on the tartly tongue-in-cheek “Girl’s Say.”

Go under the covers with Chesnutt’s pop and country, er . . . chestnuts, in Deep Cuts.

Even when he opened up to his roots by recording a cover tune, Vic Chesnutt couldn’t help but reveal the complexity that lurked deep in his emotional center. He managed to give his home state a shout-out, nod to the pop radio staples of his youth, and burrow into a bloody murder mystery by whispering his way through “The Night the Lights Went Out In Georgia.” Covering traditional bluegrass spiritual “Rank Strangers To Me” let him air out his country side, and peer into the possibilities of faith without abandoning his deep-seated existential angst. Of course, he was fully capable of penning his own kind of inspirational anthem; despite the comically unappealing options for salvation he laid out on “You Are Never Alone,” he leaned into its real message with all the might in his battered body — “keep on keepin’ on.”

Vic Chesnutt started out small — his sparsely produced debut album for the tiny Texas Hotel label wasn’t called Little for nothing. But even back then, the world was already beginning to beat a path to his door; Chesnutt’s first two albums were instigated and overseen by famous fan/fellow Athenian Michael Stipe. Over the years, his legend grew seemingly without the laconic songwriter’s assistance, earning him a role in admirer Billy Bob Thornton’s breakthrough film Sling Blade, inspiring a tribute album featuring everyone from Hootie & The Blowfish to Madonna, and bringing a long list of collaborators to his door, including Lambchop, Widespread Panic, Elf Power, and more. Over the last two decades, he released a daunting number of eccentric, intoxicating albums, but we’ve worked up a user’s guide to his many moods, modes, and projects, guaranteed to put you right at the center of the Chesnutt universe.