Christmas Eve.  I walk home underneath the Virginia moon.

Vic.

My heart dances with new love, my head swims with eggnog and rye, and my belly sings of steak in fine red wine with asparagus, asparagus. I log on and read the news: “Singer Vic Chesnutt in coma after apparent suicide attempt.” I remember the last time I heard his plain voice. The last time I heard him sing “Flirted with You All My Life.”

I am a man. I am self aware

And everywhere I go you’re always right there with me.

I’ve flirted with you all my life

Even kissed you once or twice.

And to this day I swear it was nice,

But clearly I was not ready.

Oh, Death, I’m not ready.

Then I relive the mornings when all was not right, when not even Stevie Wonder could make me smile, when all the sunny beaches and German beer and witty satire and pretty people couldn’t shake the grey away, but there was Vic, his voice spare and clean:

All of my life’s toil and blood sacrifice
Has been to make myself more attractive in her eyes
Yes, Virginia, I love you, I love you
Yes ,Virginia, enough to die
Yes, Virginia, I love you, I love you
too much to survive.

Every time I hear those words, I think if you’ve ever been in love, so in love everything you imagine is a poem of her, and everything you feel, and everything you see, and everyone you meet and speak to are simply not her, not her, not her, and you can’t understand why they won’t get out of the way, and somehow when she is there it is all real, and I think life, the universe, and everything will be okay.

Vic with guitar.

But as I sit here on a cold Virginia morning sliding out of Christmas’s shadow, I become aware, frighteningly aware, of all those I know with whom everything is definitely not okay. I think of a student this semester: young, pregnant, naïve, and angry. I consider friends who are lost to the hateful seas of politics, who see conspiracies in the shape of the road. I recall a past love and wince at the pain that lives behind her eyes.

Then I think back to when I first heard Vic Chesnutt. First sat and wondered over a line or two, as I had done before with Dylan and Waits and Will Oldham and Sam Beam. First thought of how he could stretch his voice out over a syllable, giving unimaginable power to the most common words. First felt a lump in my throat when he sang “You are the light of my life and the beat of my heart.” First realized the simplest bits of language can rise up with the greatest strength when put in the right context.

Death took a few who were important to many this year, but none of those deaths meant shit to me. The overdose of a talent like Vic Chesnutt will undoubtedly boost his career, and for those for whom this article is their first contact with Chesnutt, it is never too late, and there is a lot of material to explore. His latest, At the Cut, is brave and blessed, as is Ghetto Bells with Bill Frisell, or his collaboration with members of Widespread Panic known as brute. His music is often slow and hesitant, his voice often wounded, and his language often gaunt. His power to haunt is real, and his insistence on humanistic purity is clear in every note.

I first heard Chesnutt as part of my job writing album reviews. It is artists like him, for who art is the only thing, that keep me pushing through another plastic indie pop punk flavor of the minute. It is artists like him who keep me from cringing every time a trunk rattles in the parking lot of Thomas Nelson where I teach. It is artists like him who won’t be missed by millions, but who will be missed by a lucky few.

For more Chesnutt, check out his website: http://www.vicchesnutt.com/