Vic Chestnutt died. He was in a coma after having taken on overdose of muscle relaxants. The NY Times obituary didn’t say if the overdose was purposeful or accidental. I’m thinking that it was probably more the former than the latter.
Mr. Chesnutt had a cracked, small voice but sang with disarming candor about a struggle for peace in a life filled with pain. A car crash at age 18 left him partly paralyzed, and he performed in a wheelchair.
The accident, he has said, focused him as a songwriter, and it became the subject of some of his earliest recordings. “I’m not a victim/Oh, I am an atheist,” Mr. Chesnutt sang in “Speed Racer,” from his first album, “Little,” produced by Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and released in 1990.
A documentary, “Speed Racer: Welcome to the World of Vic Chesnutt,” was released in 1993, and in 1996 his songs were performed by Madonna, the Indigo Girls, Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M. and others for “Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation,” an album that benefited the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, a nonprofit group that offers musicians medical support.
I saw that documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994. I thought that his music did all that art was supposed to do. It provided a connection to things that I had not experienced, a context for understanding things that I sometimes see and a picture of a person who was trying to understand life and covey that understanding to others. There are people who call themselves ‘artists’, but they are just so many narcissistic breathers, for whom art functions as a way of drawing attention to themselves so that they may further the goal of participation in sensate ritual.
He sings about suicide in “Flirted With You All My Life,” from his recent album “At the Cut,” describing death as a lover he must break up with because his accomplishments in life are incomplete:
When you touched a friend of mine I thought I would lose my mind
But I found out with time that really, I was not ready, no no, cold death
Oh death, I’m really not ready.
I think that maybe life just became too much for him.