Vic Chesnutt

"I'm not an optimist/I'm not a realist/I might be a subrealist," sings Vic Chesnutt on About to Choke's "Myrtle," a darkly comic, self-effacing riddle in a career filled with dark comedy, self-deprecation, and poetic riddles. Chesnutt, who was confined to a wheelchair after a car crash at age 18, has been one of the most prolific and enigmatic songwriters of his generation, writing in a simple style that nonetheless communicates immediate sensitivity and pain. His best songs capture, in the same breath, hope and disappointment, escape and self-destruction, love and pity --stories without a plot so much as a "subrealist" attention to detail.

Chesnutt was discovered in Athens, GA, by Michael Stipe, who produced his first two albums with a light hand. Little's instrumentation is, for the most part, just Chesnutt and his guitar, which lends stark power to the album's most dramatic points. Chesnutt the poet appears fully formed here. "Gepetto" pictures Pinocchio's lonely creator left behind after his creation outgrows him, while closer to home, he tells of the anxiety of catching an opossum and a kitten in a rabbit trap and the relief when "we all three escaped safely." West of Rome expands the sound with a band but doesn't touch Chesnutt's outlook.

On Drunk and Is the Actor Happy?, Chesnutt delves deep into his psyche with portraits of a man bent on slow self-annihilation. "Sleeping Man" contemplates inactivity, while elsewhere on Drunk, he pictures cowardice of a more painful sort: "When I ran off and left her/She wasn't holding a baby/She was holding a bottle/And a big grudge against me." Chesnutt never says whether it's a bottle of formula or beer, but he makes his disappointment with himself quite clear. The reissues of the first four albums add more than 30 bonus tracks and telling essays by Stipe, Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, and other admirers.

Although Chesnutt's strong poetic voice is a constant --as is his thin, wavering little wail of a singing voice --his albums are a zigzag of varying instrumentation. About to Choke and The Salesman and Bernadette offer his most solid backing, as well as his most disciplined songwriting. "Degenerate" encapsulates Choke's death-feeds-life theme with a prayer on the beauty and tragedy of ruin and transformation. "I am a rough ball of twine," he says. "But now I am frazzled and aloof/Degenerate, disintegrate the tight knots." The character sketches on Bernadette are easier to take, and the breezy accompaniment by the alt-country ensemble Lambchop is a delight. Chesnutt's wry humor, always present but usually smothered, gets a chance to shine: "She said her father looked like Woodrow Wilson. I saw him once and thought he looked a little bit like Truman. I know for a fact he has an Eisenhower ashtray." Left to His Own Devices was recorded by Chesnutt solo, and even though it features some outstanding songs, such as "Deadline," a chilling nursery rhyme about pressure, its unevenness can be irritating. The two albums he made under the name Brute, with the bland jam band Widespread Panic backing him, are anything but uneven --but also anything but memorable. That cannot be said, however, for Merriment, an unpolished yet utterly charming collaboration with Kelly and Nikki Keneipp, a couple in the Chesnutt circle who have also worked with Jack Logan. They wrote all the music, which is played clunkily but with heart. "Bless the idiot/That makes us split a gut" is one of the many brilliantly tossed-off lines that makes one wonder if there's any limit to Chesnutt's creativity.

Silver Lake, recorded in a Los Angeles mansion with a large, expert band, is warm, commodious, and a bit too slick. Many of the songs are not up to his usual standard, though that's slightly forgivable once you get to "In My Way, Yes," a rare glimpse of joy: "I never thought/I'd ever have a life like this/I never dreamed/I'd be alive." (BEN SISARIO)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide