Vic Chesnutt is a drunken brother, a rock n’ roll savior who discovered the true message of his music after he wrapped his car around a tree on an easter morning long ago in Athens, Georgia, and consequently ended up in a wheelchair, paralyzed for life. That’s not to say that his songs are filled with any of that victim’s silver lining shit. His stuff’s about action/reaction—it’s about Russian roulette and being covered with the tar of your own history on the magic day that the answers to all your wishes float down from the sky like brilliant white feathers.

It’s about discovering your favorite poet in the footnotes of a stolen anthology.

It’s about stringing your guitar with nylon strings because you don’t have enough sensation left in your hand to strum regular ones and realizing that the resulting sound is the one you were always searching for...

There are means and ways for everything under the sun, party people. You can get high if you want to. You can hide if you want to…no one’s stopping you.

I’ve got plenty of fake names if you want one.

Always remember that it’s not what you wish for-- it’s whether or not you still bother to wish at all.

RABBIT BOX

By Vic Chesnutt—from the album, Little


While I was still in elementary school I discovered Daddy's tools
And amassed a small pile of scrap lumber
And I built a rabbit box;
Set it facing north but caught a possum and a kitten both of which were a bitch to set free
Cause I thought they were going to bite me
But we all three escaped safely
Once I took my single shotgun put on some camouflage
Hid in the neighbor's pasture by the cow pond
Finally after a long time a bunch of doves flew by and landed in a huddle on the power line
So I aimed with an eagle eye and fired but it was two pigeons that fell like bean bags into the
weeds well they sure looked like doves to me.