They’re all here, sprawled on my desk, along with a couple bootlegs of demos that went around Nashville because I wasn’t the only one who thought he was somehow special, that his songs could explode at any good moment.
For a long time I thought Chris Knight was my James Talley, immortalized by Peter Guralnick in his irreplaceable Lost Highway. Talley made some albums for Capitol, came to the attention of Jimmy Carter, and played one of Carter’s inaugural balls. I always felt like the Talley piece lodged in Lost Highway was a crumb left behind for those of us stubborn enough to follow it, that it was the one place where Talley would be remembered and rediscovered.
And so when we published the first anthology of stories from ND, I insisted (against no complaint) that Knight be there. Because I want him to be remembered.
All of which is a too-long preface, too much explanation for a website when the whole game here is quickly to get you to listen to his new album, to remind you that Heart Of Stone is in the marketplace and that Chris Knight is still worth listening to. Increasingly worth listening to.
Heart Of Stone pairs Knight again with long-ago Georgia Satellite Dan Baird, who produced (or co-produced) both Dualtone albums. I would have bet Knight would ultimately settle into being an acoustic songwriter, closer to John Prine than a rocker like “Copperhead Road”-era Steve Earle, but as with many things, I was wrong.
His songs are still far too grim for country radio, but for the first time he sounds really comfortable singing in front of the kind of rocking country band which is now the norm. (It is, incidentally, a first-cabin band, with Mike McAdam and Baird on guitars, Michael Grande on drums, Keith Christopher on bass and Tammy Rogers on various strings and backup vocals.) You could hear some of these songs on country radio in other hands, played a little faster with happier guitars chiming in.
Slipped in at the ninth track is a song called “Maria”, which goes back to those Trailer Tapes. It hasn’t changed a bit hasn’t been revisited, rewritten, reimagined though it’s better played, and fits quite comfortably among his current work.
You’ll have to slip past the opening track, a perfunctory bit of brunt bragging about the road warrior’s life (“Homesick Gypsy,” one of the songs you might imagine as Tim McGraw album cut). “Hell Ain’t Half Full,” a co-write with Gary Nicholson (who produced the last one, Enough Rope), is exactly the kind of scarred emotional territory Knight draws far too well:
Get up in the morning
Fall out of bed
Go down to the basement
Cook up a little meth
All the young folks love it
Coming back for more
Ain’t it good to be working
Got your foot in the door.
Well, now. That seems a pretty solid liberal critique, something the Bottle Rockets might have cut a decade ago.
And then the next stanza:
They chased God and Jesus
Out of our schools
And everybody’s living
By their own set of rules
Yeah, they’re preaching on the corner
Nothing good to say
Better think of something boy
Come the judgment day.
Hard to know what Knight believes, how much of that is simply a very good character study. Either way, it’s a fascinating song. A hell of a song. A hellbound train wreck of a song.
One more lyrical fragment, this from the title track:
Well I got drunk with Daddy just the other night
He said he was glad to see I turned out all right
I hear people saying like father like son
I don’t think about it much but I worry about it some.
That last line, more than the broken cars and broken hearts which populate all of Knight’s albums…that last line…yeah. I live on the other side of Kentucky from Slaughters, where Knight is from, and I’m still and always will be a foreigner in these parts. But that last line, I know that guy. Most of the men I know have spent their whole adult lives trying not to be that guy, one way or another.
Nah, one more stanza, which might serve as my momentary mantra:
Well I used to run from the past
But the world got to spinning so fast
I run from the future now
I run as fast as I can
Trying to be a simple man
I just want to slow down.
