My Best Tunes

A single by Snow Patrol which failed to make the top five in the charts was today revealed as the most widely played song of the past decade.

A single by Snow Patrol which failed to make the top five in the charts was today revealed as the most widely played song of the past decade.

Billboard.com has begun its rollout of “Best of the 2000s” content, beginning with a list of top one-hit wonders. Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day,” the song that was used to see off rejected contestants on the fifth season of American Idol, beat out songs including Terror Squad’s “Lean Back” and Crazy Town’s “Butterfy.”

Billboard.com has begun its rollout of “Best of the 2000s” content, beginning with a list of top one-hit wonders. Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day,” the song that was used to see off rejected contestants on the fifth season of American Idol, beat out songs including Terror Squad’s “Lean Back” and Crazy Town’s “Butterfy.”

His music often addressed death head-on, but this singer-songwriter - who died on Christmas day - always rose above the maudlin

Vic Chesnutt and death were far from strangers, as anyone who has spent time with his 2009 album At The Cut will know. The Athens, Georgia singer-songwriter sang of death not as something far-off and foreboding, but a constant presence, always close at hand. On Flirted With You All My Life, he describes his relationship with the reaper in the manner of a man addressing his childhood sweetheart. “I flirted with you all my life, even kissed you once or twice,” he sang atop trembling violins and warm keys. “To this day I swore it was nice – but clearly, I was not ready.”

It’s a love affair that has now been consummated. Chesnutt died on Christmas Day, following an apparently deliberate overdose of muscle relaxants. He was 45. For any talented musician to die before their time is a cause for sadness, but this is doubly painful because after well over a dozen albums, Chesnutt was at the peak of his abilities. His last couple of records for Constellation Records - At The Cut and its predecessor, North Star Deserter - were amongst his best, rendering the songs as raw, fragile chamber-rock elegies that nonetheless had the capacity to explode with impressive force.

The 1990s were a decade in which it was fashionable to play the tortured artist, but Vic Chesnutt’s troubles were genuine. Paralysed from the waist down following a car accident in 1983, Chesnutt nonetheless
explained the accident helped to focus his creativity. There has always been something in Chesnutt’s songs – a sense of humility, and a wry levity that could only have been born out of tough personal experience – that elevated his music far beyond the maudlin.

An early supporter of Chesnutt was Michael Stipe, who produced his first two albums, 1990’s Little and the following year’s West Of Rome. “Michael Stipe has told others — he never told me this but he’s told everyone else — that he recorded that first album because he wanted to capture my songs before I died or killed myself,” Chesnutt told The Quietus earlier this year.

At the risk of turning a personal tragedy into a political issue, it’s hard not to draw lines between the details of Chesnutt’s passing with the shortcomings of the current US healthcare system. While insured, Chesnutt reportedly owed $70,000 in unpaid medical bills and had recently been served with a lawsuit by a Georgia hospital. On the Constellation Records homepage, Jem Cohen, a filmmaker and producer of Chesnutt’s North Star Deserter vented his spleen at the United States’ “broken health care system depriving so many of the help they need to stay around and stay sane, and a society that never balks at providing more money for more wars but fights tooth and nail against decent care for its citizens. Vic’s death, just so you all know, did not come at the end of some cliché downward spiral. He was battling deep depression but also at the peak of his powers, and with the help of friends and family he was in the middle of a desperate search for help. The system failed to provide it.”

For his friends and family, Chesnutt’s death is a tragedy and a cause for anger. For the rest of us, it’s just another sad waste; but thankfully his wonderful music remains, and if you haven’t heard it before, now is not too late to seek it out.

The veteran singer Van Morrison revealed he had become a father again, at the age of 64, and said his new son was his “spitting image”.

It’s a pity that Paul McCartney’s brief set on the final of The X Factor would have been the first sight of him in concert for many. Out of sorts, with his voice in poor shape and his normally personality awol, he cut a puzzling figure. A couple of weeks later in a one-off London gig, he served up a tremendous, high-energy show, disspelling any fears that at 67 he might have lost his touch.

The veteran singer Van Morrison revealed he had become a father again, at the age of 64, and said his new son was his “spitting image”.

It’s a pity that Paul McCartney’s brief set on the final of The X Factor would have been the first sight of him in concert for many. Out of sorts, with his voice in poor shape and his normally personality awol, he cut a puzzling figure. A couple of weeks later in a one-off London gig, he served up a tremendous, high-energy show, disspelling any fears that at 67 he might have lost his touch.

Lyricist, Songwriters Hall of Fame-inductee and Oscar winner Don Black stands beside the snooker table in his plush Holland Park apartment and presses play on a CD player. The words to “Diamonds Are Forever”, for which Black wrote the lyrics in 1971, boom out. Black explains that Brian May recently called him up and asked him to freshen up a few of its lines. May was producing an album for West End star Kerry Ellis and wanted to include the track.