I was very pleased to find David Bazan recorded a cover of Vic Chesnutt’s “Flirted With You All My Life.” A terribly sad song about death and the allure of suicide to end a lifetime of physical pain. Vic was a paraplegic singer/songwriter who took his own life late last year.
“Flirted With You All My Life (Vic Chesnutt cover)”
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“Chesnutt’s music was an idiosyncratic blend of folk, art-rock, and country, but the darkness of his songs was never an expectation of style or a genre accessory. Rather, it was the consequence of simply being Vic Chesnutt. He let loose all of his demons into his songs, which aren’t confessional as much as they are self-reckoning, but he let more light into later songs, which sound more gracious and poignant within the framework of his career. Consider “Flirted With You All My Life”, a track from At the Cut which has become something of an epitaph in the past few weeks, quoted in numerous obituaries:
When you touched a friend of mine
I thought I would lose my mind
But I found out with time
That really, I was not ready
O Death… I’m not readyThe tragic irony of “Flirted With You All My Life” is that Chesnutt died so soon after writing those lines. There is, however, no comfort in that song; he is neither coming to terms with death nor is revealing a new appreciation for life. Instead, he is simply ruminating fearfully of the monstrous finality of death and the unbearable enormity of oblivion. That he could parse his meaning so finely in just a few words made his voice unique and his death all the more tragic: “Flirted With You All My Life” sounds like a middle chapter, not the end of the story.”
