Wild Ripostes: A Pre-Show Interview With Post-Folk Star Vic Chesnutt [at Central Presbyterian Church Sat]
Over and over again, Chesnutt’s music rises to laud the antiheroes, the underdogs. Opening with a track titled "Coward," the flickering shadows of Caliban and Gregor Samsa loom large over his latest album, At the Cut. Currently touring this newest--and obviously favorite--achievement, Vic took some time out to speak with us about how this compromised pose of the antihero, the outsider, came to define his sound. It was forced upon him very early in his musical career, which was altered forever when a car accident at age eighteen constrained him to a wheelchair and threw him on path to alter in turn the folk genre into which he’d been born.
On the track “Flirted With You All My Life,” off At the Cut, a sardonically silver-tongued Chesnutt sets up death itself as a strawman. Through personal address, he knocks death down to a tenacious coquette: I’ve flirted with you all my life/even kissed you once or twice/ and to this day I swear it was nice, but clearly/ I was not ready. 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/ O Death, O Death, O Death, clearly I’m not ready. It’s the kind of backhand devastation that Kafka himself would smile at.
Tempting as it is to focus on the literary merits of this whole inevitable betrothal to flirtatious death metaphor (we could spend all day on Vic Chesnutt lyrics) ,what’s even more exciting to music lovers is the marriage of Vic Chesnutt lyrics themselves to Fugazi energy and the torrential musicality of Godspeed You! Black Emperor/ Thee Silver Mt. Zion. In many ways, Vic Chesnutt’s current touring band, which features Guy Picciotto, Thierry Amar, Efrim Menuk, Jessica Moss and other members of the those luminous bands, is a return to his teenage punk-leaning roots.
While his lyrics flirt with death, his band is dancing with a dissonance, a volume, and an elevated temperature that all make for what Vic proudly described to us as the best music of his life. We simply can’t wait to experience it live this Saturday, as Austinist presents the Vic Chesnutt band at Austin’s Central Presbyterian Church.
Being from Athens [Georgia], your music has the South infused throughout it. Is this a conscious tribute, or just your natural context?
I am very Southern. A lot of my songs investigate my upbringing and familial life. So the Southern landscape looms very large in my musical vocabulary. The South is full of its own particular idioms and I write them into my music.
Your grandmother was a lyricist, and grandfather a songwriter and country guitarist. What were their influences on your decision to become a musician and on your music itself?
It affected how I approach songs. I learned that people write songs, people have guitars, as a hobby. I was encouraged. It’s no big deal; it’s just something to do. It’s like playing Yahtzee or something.
When I got older, I already had this songwriting muscle. It’s not some mysterious thing. And it’s not that suddenly I’m eighteen, nineteen years old, I’m a hipster, and I’m writing songs, and it’s all so mysterious.
Now I can write a song about anything. My grandma wrote a song about the city of Jacksonville- and she won a songwriting contest with it. It was a legacy. And it seemed very natural.
We’ve heard that the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry made a huge impression on you as a young man and on your songwriting. Could you tell us a little about how those literary influences translated into your music?
It had the biggest impact. And that was in that it’s like a Bible of human knowledge. These ideas I was kicking around were things that writers thought about, and wrote about. They wrote poems about anything, about everything, or just images. And I learned poetic devices, metaphors and similes and all those. I learned you could be formal and informal, bawdy and serious, dark and light at the same time.
As far as influences, Leonard Cohen is straight out of this tradition, as a musician and a poet. You know, I’m an atheist; I didn’t have this great supernatural connection to the Bible. This was a secular worship.
Many of the characters in your songs seem more like archetypes than specific people. Do you think this can be traced back to your literary influences?
Well, in the South, a lot of people I grew up around were larger than life.
The archetype of the underdog seems to play a major role.
Very much so. I personally have a great affinity for the underdog. It’s how I see myself in society. You know- as a crippled man. It’s pretty easy for people to understand. Before, as a white male, I was the oppressor. But now I’m an underdog, a minority.
Satire also plays a big part in your songwriting, like with “You Are Never Alone” [from the 2007 album North Star Deserter], with some pretty pointed satire on religion. Do you think your upcoming Austin show, being in a church venue, will change that performance at all?
No, not at all. I’ve played in a lot of churches. A church is just a venue. Every venue is different and shapes the way the audience and I interact. I love playing in churches. The space is inspiring. But it’s the sound that’s inspiring.
This venue I’m playing at in Austin actually called and asked me to tone it down a little. I said no- forget it. I’m not going to censor myself in any way.
You’ve done some work in film. If you could score a film by any director, which director would it be?
Well, I loved the work I did with Sebastian Schipper on a German indie film called Mitte Ende August. And with Gary Hawkins on a documentary about Larry Brown, called The Rough South of Larry Brown.
I love film. I think film is the greatest genre of art. It combines everything: visual, tonal arts and poetry. It’s the greatest honor. I look forward to doing it again.
Is the process of songwriting different for you when writing for a film?
I’m known as a lyrical writer. So it changes the approach very much. When scoring The Rough South, the director, Gary Hawkins, would play this Carl Orff piece and say, "I kinda want something like this." I was inspired by that music and tried to come up with my own textures to lay over it. But, you know, writing songs for albums is kind of a selfish process. It’s all very personal.
At the Cut is your second collaboration with Guy [Picciotto]. What do you enjoy about that collaboration?
I think it’s the most powerful band that anyone ever put together. It’s a brain trust, this band. It’s an all-star band. It’s so powerful. I’m not a fountain of confidence in my work usually, but I really feel like I’m making the greatest rock-n-roll every night. I can see it on people’s faces, also. I can see it in the audience.
And the volume is insane- from very delicate to bombastic, full-force rock. It’s an absolute dream. This post-punk rock energy paired with my folk is the best music I’ve ever made. And the record doesn’t even do it justice.
