Vic Chesnutt: Dark side of the tune

The car crash that paralysed him also unlocked Vic Chesnutt's music. Nick Hasted meets the sultan of self-hatred

In 1983, Vic Chesnutt, an obscure country misfit, was 18, drunk again, and crashing his car in America's southern state of Georgia. When he woke from his coma, his body was confined to a wheelchair. Eventually, in unlikely ways, the disaster was to invigorate him. The songs he had been writing since childhood became darker, freer and funnier: smut, self-loathing, satire and startling stories swirled out of his head, alongside wistful, graceful music. He continued shaking his brain up with drink, and raging full-tilt at the world, his paralysis a barely considered side effect of a deeper condition, of despair and fascination with extremes. His fellow Georgian Michael Stipe forced him into a studio before he self-destructed completely, to record his debut album, Little (1990).

There have been collaborations since with Chesnutt's fellow cultural outsiders Lambchop (on the beautiful The Salesman and Bernadette, of 1998), and Madonna is among those who have covered his songs. Now, after hearing his 11th album, Silver Lake, contemporaries such as Tom Waits are suddenly queuing to call him America's laureate. The alt.country king Howe Gelb simply says that he's the country's "best, most indestructible songwriter". Listen to Silver Lake, though, and you know praise won't turn Chesnutt's head. It starts with songs of distressed withdrawal from humanity, even as it ends with lyrics of love.

"I am ambivalent towards human beings," Chesnutt admits. "It's ugly, but true. I am always at extremes. Maybe that's what powers me. I can go from 'I'm a lover' to 'I'm despicable, toxic trash'. When I remember there's a whole giant universe out there, then I feel good. It's when I look inside me that these extremes vibrate so hard." Chesnutt's contrary nature was forged in isolation, in the backwoods of Pine County, Georgia. Though he loved the closeness of nature, and was loved by friends and parents, he found himself "at odds with the Protestant power structure". "I had a revelation that I was an atheist at a very early age," he remembers, "and I bumped up with these fuckers my whole time there. Sometimes it felt great to be at war with them. But I knew I needed to go somewhere else."

Chesnutt found escape first in music. His mother wrote poems, and his grandfather played guitar, so songwriting seemed a natural act. And when he heard Bob Dylan, The Beatles and Leonard Cohen, he realised what songs could be, absorbing their story-telling. His own music, though, was still "goofy, happy pop – what I thought people wanted to hear". It took another method of transcending his smalltown life to start his transformation. "I love drinking," he sighs happily, even now. "I just love intoxication. It's empowering, because it takes you out of here, into something else. You become someone... other. I haven't had a drink in two years. My liver, I killed it. But I still think about that feeling a lot."

As with all Chesnutt's instincts, though, self-hatred was entwined with this self-discovery. So when he drunkenly crashed his car, it didn't destroy him. "If I had been the glory boy, it might have been harder for me," he considers. "But I was a jerk, I was driving drunk. I did it. I pretty much accepted it right off the bat. Like, 'What, did you expect anything else out of your life?' I never even felt much horror, really. I was more fascinated, in a sick way. I felt like, 'Oh well. This puts a whole new spin on things.'"

That must understate the crash's awfulness. But somehow, in the coma that followed, the changes Chesnutt had always desired began to spark. When he woke, he could improvise music as never before. "After the downtime, I rebooted," he says. And a year later, his true transformation came about. Shoplifting a book of modern poetry, he discovered the combination of "hilarity and deathly seriousness" in Stevie Smith, and realised his lyrics could be about his own life.

The thrill was more than musical. "It was like coming out or something. It was a really wonderful era," he says of his second paralysed year. The time since has included a week in 1998 spent by a hotel pool, contemplating tumbling in and drowning himself, and a layer of seething self-hatred "like a low-grade fever – it'll never leave". But, as Silver Lake's last song, "In My Way, Yes", suggests, the achievements torn out of his tempestuous life also leave Chesnutt happy and grateful. "If I look at a list of the things I've done, it's fantastic to me," he says. "I didn't even expect to be alive. Everything I do now is gravy."

'Silver Lake' is out this week on New West records