Cody ChesnuTT seems like the type of guy who needs to be on the move at all times. He’s the guy who can’t help but constantly change the radio station in his car, desperately trying to find something worth listening to. Ample evidence of his mercurial nature can be found on his pleasingly schizophrenic debut double-album, ambitiously titled The Headphone Masterpiece (Ready, Set — Go!).
The album is a thoroughly eclectic affair that never gets boring. Whether he’s playing reggae, ’60s-style pop, lo-fi indie-rock, Motown-flavored doo-wop, Southern-fried hip-hop, gritty R&B or even folk, ChesnuTT, with his sweet, soulful voice, consistently excels and often amazes. Listening to The Headphone Masterpiece is just like flipping the stations on a radio dial but, instead of an endless stream of mind-numbing rubbish, each different frequency is playing exactly what you want to hear.
“Songwriters are just music lovers, and true music lovers don’t want to hear the same song over and over,” said the soft-spoken ChesnuTT, 32, in a recent phone interview. “Music shouldn’t be an assembly line. Being prolific is a blessing but your true objective is to let each piece have its own life. Repeating the same thing has no value.”
The album is lyrically diverse as well. On the poppy ode to infidelity, “The Seed,” ChesnuTT deadpans the racy chorus, “Push my seed in her bush for life / It’s gonna work because I’m pushing it right / If Mary dropped a baby girl tonight / I would name it rock ‘n’ roll.” But, on the 45-second Motown-inflected gem “The Most Beautiful Shame,” ChesnuTT turns into a lovelorn Romeo as he croons, “A piece of my heart would me missing / If you let my kissing stop / It would be the most beautiful shame / If our beauty didn’t stay the same.”
“The personality is an amalgam of things,” said ChesnuTT, explaining the pimp/lover dichotomy of his words. “We’re very complex individuals and because we’re all exposed to the same worldly things, we can relate.”
On the slow-burning hip-hop/soul anthem “Serve This Royalty,” the singer’s vocals slither around a horn-laden beat. “Platinum chains and rings is all a brother knows now / Girl you’re one of the first to know that gold is back in town / So you gotta serve this royalty,” he sings.
“There are many levels to that song,” ChesnuTT said of “Serve This Royalty.” “It speaks to how the survival of the African man has hustled the street and tried to find out a way out of the box and it speaks to the creator — if you want to get what you want, you have to serve a higher power. Even the pimp game on the street, as screwed up and twisted as it is, is a survival system that allows one to eat and dress and have a sense of independence.
“Unfortunately, hustling and pimping are traps and you just end up running around in circles. It goes back to the basic element of the street, from the gutter to the glorious creator.”
After his first rock band, Venus Loves A Melody, was signed and then dropped by Disney’s Hollywood Records, ChesnuTT started to make music by himself in his bedroom.
“I just used the bare elements: a microphone, a guitar, a drum machine, a pair of headphones and a four-track,” he said. “When I was recording in my bedroom, I didn’t have to worry about engineers or producers, I just thought, ‘This is what I want to say now.’ And then just go onto the next thing.
“It’s just a flow with me, just one thing to the next. If you throw the right pieces together, it builds itself. When you’re working with a four-track, you don’t have that many choices, so it limits the confusion. You have to make every track worth it.”
The lo-fi aesthetic ChesnuTT utilized gives the album a fresh, raw sound totally devoid of any studio gloss. Although several record labels expressed interest in the album, ChesnuTT was not willing to sacrifice its bare-bones intimacy in order to make the songs more listener-friendly.
“The record companies all came with the same thing at heart,” he said.
“Even if they know about music, they know what the business has taught them, which is the same old formula. They say, ‘Let’s re-record some of the songs.’ But to change anything will kill the story. Anybody can go into a studio and get a record deal, but the idea of making it homegrown is the new inspiration. You don’t have to sell yourself short now. You can do it yourself.”
And that’s exactly what he did. ChesnuTT released The Headphone Masterpiece on his own label, Ready, Set — Go! Without a large distribution deal or budget behind it, the album has slowly leaked its way to the public over the last year and a half. With positive endorsements from established artists like the Roots and Macy Gray, the album was finally officially released, albeit exclusively via ChesnuTT’s Web site (codychesnutt.com), last month.
“It’s growing at a cool pace,” he said of the album’s slow progress into the marketplace.
“I don’t want to get caught up in things. I’ve seen how it can happen. I just want to watch the album take off as much as I can. I recently got an e-mail from a guy who was like, right off the bat, ‘We want 20 dates in the UK.’
“That’s a blessing and all, but that would be 20 days of my life that’s planned already. I just want to spend time with my family and play music. I don’t want to get burned out.” nyou
