In a two-decade career, Vic Chesnutt sang darkly comic and often disarmingly candid songs about death, vulnerability, and life’s simple joys. A car accident when he was 18 left him partly paralyzed, but he has said that the accident focused him as a musician and a poet. “It was only after I broke my neck and even like maybe a year later that I really started realizing that I had something to say,†he said in a recent radio interview with Terry Gross. Discovered in the late 1980s by Michael Stipe of R.E.M., who produced his first two albums, he has been a mainstay in independent music, collaborating with the bands Lambchop and Widespread Panic. 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 medical support for musicians. Recently he had had a burst of creativity, releasing two albums in 2009, “At the Cut†and “Skitter on Take-Off.†In the song, “Flirted With You All My Life,†off “At the Cut,†he sings about suicide, which he had attempted several times….and apparently finally had success if he was ready, or not.
