Is the Actor Happy?
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| Is the Actor Happy? | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | 1995 | |||
| Genre | Folk rock | |||
| Label | Texas Hotel Records[1] | |||
| Producer | John Keane | |||
| Vic Chesnutt chronology | ||||
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Is the Actor Happy? is an album by the American folk rock musician Vic Chesnutt, released in 1995.[2][3] The title of the album's first track was used as the subtitle to a 1996 benefit album, Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation, recorded to raise funds for Chesnutt's health care.[4]
Chesnutt supported the album by touring with Friends of Dean Martinez.[5] The album was reissued by New West Records in 2004.[6]
The album was produced by John Keane.[7] Michael Stipe contributed vocals to "Guilty by Association".[8] Chesnutt wrote the songs while opening for Live on a 1994 tour.[9]
Music and lyrics
According to Steve Dollar of Paste Magazine: "Chesnutt was a rolling contradiction. His songs scanned like nursery rhymes but stuck—as he sang on “Betty Lonely” from Is the Actor Happy?, “like a flounder gig”—on polysyllabic turns of phrase that tease the ear as they beg for the Oxford English Dictionary. Elegant and ungainly, impish and morbidly depressed, flat-assed drunk and piercingly sober, his salient obsessions circled around private peculiarities and public personae, scrawled like graffiti on the wall of a gas station, glimpsed through the Spanish moss. His wounded warble was an epic surprise, too: sweeping like Marvin Gaye, in its way, and teetering with uncertainty—like a bastard Wallenda, who defied gravity out of sheer heart."[10]
