Five no-frills 1990s albums that define lo-fi

Little by Vic Chesnutt (1990)

In the late 1980s, Vic Chesnutt was growing into a local legend in Athens, Georgia. With all the major labels traveling south in search of the next R.E.M., Chesnutt, though he too would sign with a label, was doing his best to keep Athens independent and real. He would sit in small local clubs, strumming his guitar and singing his songs – sometimes with accompaniment, and sometimes all by himself.

He had broken his neck in a car crash earlier in the decade so he did his performances sitting in a wheelchair, with a prosthetic glove on his right hand allowing him to play guitar.

Chesnutt caught the attention of Michael Stipe, who must have seen a kindred spirit in the writer of mysterious, textured songs that dug deep into both high art and local primitives. The frontman of R.E.M. produced a marathon session at John Keane’s studio in Athens one night in 1988. Chesnutt played and sang for nine hours, cutting 21 songs. Two years later, in 1990, nine of those songs were released as part of Chesnutt’s debut, Little.

The instrumentation was sparse. On the first track, “Isadore Duncan,” there’s a brief harmonica intro followed by Chesnutt’s guitar. Stipe plays a simply roving keyboard line. There are some voices echoing in the background. That’s it. Duncan was a fascinating subject for Chesnutt since like her, he had broken his neck in the car-related accident. Unlike the dancer, the singer survived.

The remainder of the songs are equally simple and equally beautiful – small portraits of small, regular people, sharply observed and cleverly enunciated – like “Danny Carlisle,” who would “rather dream than f**k.” Or the heroine in “Soft Picasso,” a modern girl whose “taste wasn’t limited to just modern guys – Since another modern girl showed her - That other modern girls could hold her.”

The final track on Little is as lo-fi as it gets. It was not recorded at the marathon session with Stipe. It is literally a home recording and that is exactly how it sounds. Echoey, with snaps and crackles throughout, it is a heartfelt tribute to Chesnutt’s muse at the time, British poet Stevie Smith, in which he uses her lyrics for his song, accompanied by a banjo, fiddle and a few background singers.

Chesnutt would go on to release more than a dozen albums over the next twenty years before an overdose took his life on Christmas Day, 2009.