Is the Actor Happy?  The question drills our attention through the character played by an actor to the actor himself.  Through the appearance of feeling to the source of feeling.  And that typifies Vic Chesnutt’s approach to songwriting.  In Vic’s songs, the fall from grace comes from the loss of attention.  We’ve been diverted if-- when we see the crow picking a carcass, an army convoy speeding past, a friend who shows up late at the Queen’s Home-- we aren’t humbled by the gravity of the situation.  Over and over Vic finds at the old, wooden table of the ordinary, an exquisite onion soup.  When he eyeballs the familiar, he makes out the immanent.

Is the Actor Happy?, his fourth album, was nurtured into being by what Vic called “the scared skiffle group”-- Tina Chesnutt on bass, Vic singing and playing guitar solos, Jimmy Davidson manning drums, organ, and Casio piano, and Alex McManus on guitars, Concertina and thumb piano, with various other friends on backup vocals and “wild” and “straight” cellos.  Those cellos, and producer John Keane’s keen ears, help make this perhaps Vic’s warmest album.  In “Betty Lonely,” the chorus voices are as soft and diaphanous as fog lifting from a lake.  And in “Sad Peter Pan,” Vic’s gentlest twang slips in and out of a dark lullaby, the guitars, drums and brushes choiring in lush, hammocky ease. 

But this is also the album in which Vic uncorks “Free of Hope,” his great elegy to our culture at the end of the millennium. In three brief, alliterative, hilarious stanzas, Chesnutt limns the dysfunctional family, environmental and educational neglect, boredom, trendy social tropes, sexual dalliance, advertising, and the feeling of a wasted life:

        Bricks are dirty, lakes are dead

        The family dog is mad

        Baby brother’s science beakers are broken

        And now the yard peacocks are all sad

        Board games are boring

        May they rot on the shelf

        Big brother’s at Columbia University

        Quote unquote he’s tanning beaver pelts

        Subtle as a billboard

        Oh so refined

        Smoking through my chimney

        Burning up this life of mine

These lyrics are nudged along by a tune that begins with a crackly far-off yodel that might be surfacing from another century.  A soft acoustic melody is suddenly overwhelmed by the WHAM of percussion and an electric guitar that sounds like the musical performance of a David Smith sculpture: steel strings flailed across a metal worktable.  The guitars and drums gather behind the voice and chase it into a haunting refrain that inverts Martin Luther King’s dream for our future and catches our emptiness and irony at the 20th century’s demise: “Free of hope, free of a past/ Thank you god of nothing I’m free at last.” 

Vic Chesnutt is one flat-out original.  When a critic for The New Yorker, praising Chesnutt, called his lyrics prolix, I think what he meant was complex.  You never find Vic making a bid on any cheap resolution of contradictions.  Nor does he drop I-love-you-I-need-you-I-just don’t-know-what-to-do-since-you-left-me clichés, those staples of irremediable mediocrities.  Instead, more like the T’ang Dynasty poets, he often writes about a difficult subject, friendship, what Albert Camus called the “primary virtue.”  In “Onion Soup,” for instance, Vic considers friendship in its gummy, inconsistent intricacy, his voice acrobatically lyrical as the guitar chords descend.  In “Thailand” where he chomps down on the front of each refrain, and in “Guilty by Association” where a cello rounds out the edge of his self-berating comparisons, Vic continues to probe friendship with a nuance as delicate as the antennal fencing of crickets.

As a poet, Chesnutt is aroused by the desire to name, by the suppleness of words.  He uses adjectives as nouns-- “Some sexual turned into some Biblical”-- he name-drops-- “Rupert Murdoch, Larry Flynn and Bob Guccione”-- he studs colloquial lines with abracadabric diction-- puce, gaff, imbued-- he vivifies images with detail-- “my denim shirt all dark with sweat”-- and he can be as whimsical-- “even her freakish nipples are akimbo”-- as he can be devastating-- “I was born out of a ghost.”  His rhymes are always intrepid.  Maudlin seduces cosmopolitan.  And Vic would sooner let history rhyme with itself than pair it with the predictable mystery. 

In Is the Actor Happy? more than in any previous album, Vic explores both the elasticity of silence and the blare of reverb.  The sweet, sad, cortege of “Gravity of the Situation” slows to a stop before the electric thump of the refrain rolls it forward again.  Many of the other songs, too, are marked by variable tempos and sharp dynamics of tension and release.  Melodies subside into a quiet that is swollen, like water before it boils, with longing.  The the friction of the drummer’s brush across the cymbals ignites a dense, driving ensemble passion.  Drawing out his vowels, Vic unmuzzles his plaintive blue yodel.  And napalm hits the brain. 

Urgently immediate, Is the Actor Happy? wants to stay all night. Light the stove, put on coffee. Vic’s songs are here to harrow your soul.