Sunday Classic Cover- Vic Chesnutt

Arming oneself with an acoustic guitar and a pop song then dutifully playing its chords and singing its lyrics is one of the most overused methods of cover version creations there is. For every Elbow appearing on the Live Lounge, there's 25 of these. But every now and then, this method creates something beyond beautiful. I had intended to write about Vic Chesnutt's oddball cover of R.E.M.'s It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), but for the first time, I'm instead writing about another of his covers which I only discovered tonight during my research. To be honest, it's knocked me sideways.

Vic Chesnutt was a long term fixture on the same vibrant Athens, Georgia scene which spawned R.E.M. Whether working on his succession of solo albums, or with his band Brute, everything he put his name to was tinged with fragility, his vocal bleak, distant, and captivating. Yet nothing was ever quite as fragile as this, a cover of Kylie Minogue's Come Into My World from the soundtrack to the movie Mitte Ende August.

On Christmas Day 2009, just months after its release, Vic Chesnutt was dead, taking his own life, an overdose of muscle relaxants successful. He had suffered years of being refused cover for medical insurance, $50,000 dollars in debt for treatment needed after a car accident at age 18 left him confined to a wheelchair and with limited use of his hands. Thanks to an American healthcare system which is thankfully finally under scrutiny, Vic Chesnutt simply could not afford to live, so he took the decision to die. It's difficult not to hear this cover as a cry for someone to look at how this system worked, how a man who worked hard, released sixteen albums in nineteen years could be treated this way.

He was always upfront and honest in his own lyric writing about his battles, but after his death, said to be his fourth suicide attempt, this song's "I've been chasing the life I'm dreaming, now I'm home" takes on a much darker subtext than anything songwriter Cathy Dennis could have imagined from the song.

Here's Vic's R.E.M. cover too. Don't expect the scattergun pop of the original. I like to think of it as a jigsaw puzzle of Michael Stipe's dream led lyrical vision.