Once a self-confessed “street bum, a complete drunk”, and wheelchair-bound since a car accident in 1983, Vic Chesnutt was first coerced into recording in 1988 by Michael Stipe, REM’s vocalist. Since then the 32-year-old songwriter from Athens, Georgia, has delivered five critically acclaimed, low-key and wryly humorous albums, and his big-label debut for Capitol Records, About to Choke, is out tomorrow. Earlier this year, Chesnutt was the beneficiary of the Sweet Relief Musicians’ Fund’s second album, Sweet Relief II. Acts as diverse as country diva Nanci Griffith, stadium rockers Garbage and the Smashing Pumpkins, and even pop siren Madonna, queued up to cover his songs. “It’s quite odd, I suppose,” he reflects. “But I’ve always been a songwriters’ songwriter. That’s my curse.”

The first evidence of Chesnutt’s “curse” was his 1990 debut, Little. With Stipe at the controls, his broken Southern-twanged whine and battered nylon-string guitar forged a distinctive collection of acoustic short stories. Its highlight was Speed Racer, an inspiring hymn to non-belief. “I’m not a victim, I’m an atheist,” he sang, “so don’t try to spray me with your archaic rites of soul/I can dodge the thunderbolts and scratch out an existence on this glorious but simple plane.” Chesnutt’s ability to find beauty in the everyday, in the “simple plane”, is what makes him so special. He has a childlike apprehension of joy and sorrow. Ever the Sad Peter Pan of his song of the same name, Chesnutt is a boy who grew up, but without the attendant adult superstitions and bitterness.

Recent years, however, have seen a mellowing. For Sweet Relief II, Chesnutt presented a song called God is Good to his friend, the unashamedly Christian singer Victoria Williams, herself a precious Sweet Relief beneficiary, on account of her multiple sclerosis. “It’s funny that we get along so well. In my younger days, I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate it all,” he explains. “I’d written God is Good a long time ago after reading a Wallace Stevens poem. I kind of paraphrased it and set it to music. We were sitting around in the desert in Joshua Tree, where Victoria lives, and all of a sudden I said: ‘Victoria, I gotta tell you, I really would like you to sing this song or I’m gonna regret it for the rest of my life.’ She said: ‘Let’s do it!’, and that was that.”

God is Good isn’t the only contribution to Sweet Relief II that’s laced with irony. Chesnutt’s association with Stipe led to innumerable run-ins with probing Stipe obsessives, and in turn to the writing of Guilty by Association, a description of a friendship compromised by the albatross of celebrity. On Chesnutt’s version, Stipe himself sang of being “canonised” and “terrorised” and questioned by “all the little loonies with their salient obsessions”. On country-rock songwriter Joe Henry’s cover, Stipe’s part is taken by Henry’s somewhat more famous sister-in-law, Madonna. “It couldn’t have been a more perfect pairing,” says Chesnutt with pride. “The song deals with obsessed fans and Madonna, at the time, had come to LA for the trial of a stalker. It was really ironic. I couldn’t be happier with it.”

Putting Chesnutt’s songs into the hands of other artists also goes some way to reducing the red herring of “Vic Chesnutt – disabled songwriter”. It’s tempting to see the lyrics of Sleeping Man, from 1993’s Drunk, as a description of Chesnutt’s own condition – “You’re a freak of nature/you are Siamese/you are in a pickle jar/for all the world to see” – but the song turns out to have been inspired by a memory of his sister laughing at their sleeping father. However,

Chesnutt is predictably tolerant of pigeonholing. “I understand it,” he says. “My wish is that they’d talk about my songwriting but, hey, if there was a songwriter with two mouths they’d talk about that. If you’re any different, they talk about it.”

The new album, About to Choke, is a sudden step forward from last year’s finely wrought and stylistically consistent masterpiece, Is the Actor Happy?, where Chesnutt finally learned to write for a band, brushed drums and ringing lead-guitar lines tumbling over his simple strumming. About to Choke, by constrast, is demanding, diverse and erratic to a degree that might intimidate newcomers, though it grows more intimate with every hearing.

Giant Sand and Myrtle respectively scale the alternately robust or fragile heights of Chesnutt’s back catalogue, and Swelters might be one of his finest songs to date, a string of resonant, fatalistic epigrams, sung over a timeless classical-guitar figure. Hopefully, Chesnutt’s new paymasters will have the courage to stick with him, to indulge him, even. His is a voice that deserves to be heard.