1. Vic Chesnutt

We were really, really close. I met him through Bob Mould. We got close because we’re both from Georgia and we had similar approaches to songwriting but he gleefully rushed off that cliff while I was almost phobic about songwriting. We had similar senses of humour. We toured together on my first solo record. And we did two subsequent tours together over here with the two of us on stage just talking and playing songs. He was one of my closest friends. Very few people ‘get it’ and he ‘got it’.

‘Rabbit Box’ is a good introduction to how beautiful bleak can be, and he was good at that. It’s also a good example of his fluid timing. He could play bass, lead and rhythm [guitar] in the same song and leave all this air and space round it. There is implied timing but that’s it. Seriously, try and cover one of his songs. I used to say to him, “What’s the metre?!” And he would say, “I ain’t got no metre! Kick my ass!” But it tells a story from his bizarre Southern childhood, where he would go and shoot a tree until it fell down. He was a disturbed child… with a gun!