KTH RDGWY

Vic Chesnutt died on Christmas Day. I didn’t hear until just this week. Just the other day. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t understand it. It seems such a stupid thing, on my part, to have missed that piece of news, given all the useless, pointless, frivolous pieces of news I did not miss. I am angry that he died. Angry that I didn’t know. The anger serves as flimsy cover for the fact that that I am peculiarly moved by his death. By its circumstances, by his age, by the feeling it leaves me of something close to grief.

Which is, objectively, silly. I didn’t know him. Never met him. Saw him play live just once. I don’t have anything at all to say about him other than that his music was and remains important to me, and that he struck me as a better man than I could ever hope to be. He created. He expressed and manifested a relationship to the world and to being alive that was straightforward art, and which was beautiful and profound, and he nudged me with a truthfulness that will touch me, I’m pretty sure, for the rest of my life.

This song, that he performs in the video below, has been my favourite song for months, since it first appeared on At The Cut . It is almost unbearably poignant now. I love its honesty, its precise pain, and its insistence on not being ready. Maybe readiness comes suddenly. And when we’re ready, we go.