Vic Chesnutt: Is The Actor Happy?
I would have thought this record would have gotten Vic Chesnutt on the radio: it's got many of his greatest songs, and it is slickest only second to last year's slick Silver Lake, and would have fit the alt-rock radio mood of the year it came out. The songs on this one were highly represented on the Sweet Relief tribute, and the Hootie cover of the lead-off track only reinforced the idea, for me, that several songs on this record could have been singles. Maybe this is where having a tiny label doesn't work -- I don't know.
The fault, if you want to call it that, is in the production (by John Keane, who engineered Little and About to Choke and, judging by his online CV -- an impressive list of clients include REM and Indigo Girls -- is a more successful engineer than producer). The sound is clean, too clean, and the arranging is predictable, and I don't think that that suits Chesnutt much. It's a sticking point for me.
That being what it is, it is full to bursting with great tunes: Sad Peter Pan is among his best, as is Free of Hope. His very pretty duet with Michael Stipe, Guilty By Association (about a trying relationship with a famous friend) has some great lyrics:
all the little loonies, with their salient obsession
come out from the boonies
with their Sharpies
and their guns
loaded with questionsand features the nicest harmony-singing on any Vic recording. Onion Soup is a brilliant Bobby Jean-type of open letter to a misplaced friend -- with less emoting, though, and Chesnutt's writerly skill:
I wrote you an eloquent postcard once
about the most exquisite onion soup.
I never mailed it, though,
cause it was your turn in the loop.One addendum to the production rant is this: Chesnutt's voice sounds brilliant. Every nuance of his singing, which is as lively here as it is on the Brute record, is up front, and it does deserve that kind of treatment. Maybe I just needed a couple of broken guitars in the mix. Maybe I'm a pain in the ass. Is the Actor Happy is a must-have Chesnutt record, it is, but ... I don't listen to it much. Does that make any sense?
Vic Chesnutt: Is the Actor Happy?.Texas Hotel, 1995.
Review by Jeff Clayton. June 2004.