Chris Whitley died on November 20, 2005, at 45. Pollstar reported confirmation from his daughter after the singer and guitarist had canceled his remaining performances and entered hospice care with lung cancer. His recordings had taken him from the blues and folk of his 1991 debut, Living With the Law, through electric rock, solo acoustic performances and experiments with electronic production.
The National guitar at the center of much of that music had first offered a practical solution. Whitley told Dean Budnick in a 2000 Jambands interview that he traded his electric equipment for a National at 17 and moved to New York to play on the streets. “I didn’t want to play strummy folk guitar but I couldn’t lug an amp around,” he said. Its rougher tone suited him, too.
That choice didn’t confine him to acoustic music. Din of Ecstasy, released in 1995, put an electric band around his songs. In the same interview, Whitley recalled feeling that his label was waiting for another Living With the Law while he wanted to make something different. The disagreement affected more than the arrangements: he described recording delays and being told the label wouldn’t promote Din of Ecstasy as he began touring it. After 1997’s Terra Incognita, his relationship with Sony ended.
For 1998’s Dirt Floor, the recording setup became small enough to fit into his father’s Vermont workshop. Producer Craig Street told Mix in 1999 that they had initially planned to work in Whitley’s apartment, then changed location. The workshop had a wood-burning stove and old motorcycle parts, and Whitley already used it for writing. They suspended a single microphone from wire, partly because of his foot stomping and partly because they had forgotten the stand. With the equipment set up in the kitchen and cables running to the workshop, Whitley played through the songs in a day. They assembled the master reel the following morning.
Released by Messenger Records, Dirt Floor outsold his previous Sony album, according to Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers’ 2005 report for NPR. A recording made with one microphone had given Whitley a viable way forward after the major-label deal.
He continued changing the surroundings of his guitar and voice. On 2005’s Soft Dangerous Shores, producer Malcolm Burn worked with keyboards, loops and samples alongside Whitley’s National. Rodgers reported that the album was written and recorded in two weeks, with Whitley developing the next song while Burn mixed the previous one. The speed was deliberate: Whitley wanted to get past his own habits of judging what he made. He also spoke about quiet singing and leaving room for listeners to hear more in a small vocal gesture, an approach that gave those electronic arrangements a human center.
Another collaboration from that final year brought him together with Australian guitarist Jeff Lang. In April 2005, they recorded 12 songs in Melbourne for Dislocation Blues, fulfilling a plan to make an album together that stretched back a decade. The sessions combined new compositions, covers and reworked material from their earlier records. Whitley returned to “Rocket House” and “Velocity Girl”; the band also wrote “Underground” during the sessions.
