Definitive Albums: Vic Chesnutt 'West of Rome' (1991)

When Vic Chesnutt passed away on Christmas Day, 2009, after finally relenting to the 'suicidal personality' that had always been there —been there even before he drove drunk and ended up an 18-year-old paraplegic— suddenly his entire back-catalogue was heard anew; was tinged by the light of hindsight. When Chesnutt rolled off this mortal coil, by the power of his own hand, his back-catalogue became, for many, a set of clues; one long road-map leading to his eventual, inevitable demise. On news of suicide, the rote response was to search through his life for preemptors of his death.

And Chesnutt provided plenty, especially in recent years. But go back to his songwriting salad days, to his sophomore set West of Rome, and you hear a young-ish man bristling with life. "As of late I'm looking forward to the future," he sings, in the otherwise-eerie "Panic Pure," before delivering the second half of a classic Chesnutt couplet: "though I've never been much of a planner."

In the same song, Chesnutt warns "all you observers in your scrutiny/don't count my scars like tree rings," already fending away those carefully combing through his work in search of remnants of his manifest trauma.

Here, even when Chesnutt plays to such a crowd, moaning "I'm barely alive" in the awe-inspiring "Stupid Preoccupations," it's not a dalliance with death, but part of a song acknowledging —to wife/bassist, Tina Chesnutt, it seems— that he's a bad patient; a surly bastard who won't just lay back and play the helpless cripple.

Chesnutt self-diagnoses such complaints as "primal griping," and, though such a term loses the considered, cerebral craft of his dexterous lyrics, you could happily apply such a self-diagnosis to Chesnutt as songwriter: profoundly human, but pissed-off and bristling on some elemental level. He's an author who, in the face of pain, has made persistent friction his bedfellow.

Chesnutt's voice plays to the idea: the songsmith wields it like a rasp, using its rough timbre to turn phrases smooth. And so ends that song, a standout on the most upstanding of Chesnutt records, with Vic self-mocking with a wink that admits he's lucky to have anyone, let alone a wife like his: "When I break into that smile that is aching/it may be too ugly to look on."

West of Rome, for so long Chesnutt's most beloved, acclaimed, and influential work, can happily be seen as a microcosm for his long, sprawling career. Chesnutt made a habit out of change, navigating from album to album with whim as his co-pilot ("I never knew what I wanted to be," he once self-eulogized, of his uneven discography). And, on his second record, he covers a lot of ground.

Here, such skipping-about is embodied not just by the album's many moods and modes, as whole, but even by the effect of two back-to-back tracks delivered mid-album. First, it's "Steve Willoughby," a buoyantly silly and resolutely funky ditty that name-drops Louis Farrakhan, Larry King, and Jane’s Addiction in two swift minutes. It shifts into "West of Rome," an aching, sombre, five-minute milker in which lingering piano sounds out as the drowned sorrows of an unlikeable protagonist, this Southern Gothic tale culminating with Chesnutt engulfing the trembling mix in a wordless howl steeped in inconsolable sadness.

Amidst this title-track, the songsmith finds time to deliver another worth-savoring phrase: "a childhood full of dry goods and wet neglect." And it's this that defines an album that skips about, soundwise; that makes West of Rome —that makes Chesnutt's discography, really— a singular, coherent work. Chesnutt's career was a patchwork stitched together by his wit; every dry turn-of-phrase, pith-soaked observation, and half-ironic lament helping to define a singular portrait of a multi-faceted artist.

Record Label: New West (Reissue)
Release Date: January 1991