It’s a feeling the protagonists in Knight’s songs would know well. But Knight, who was 37 when his first album came out and is now 41, kept plugging away and eventually landed at the nascent Dualtone label. Founded by former Arista-Austin executives Dan Herrington and Scott Robinson, Dualtone clearly is aiming to attract artists burned by the endless rounds of corporate mergers and acquisitions; besides Knight, early signees include Jim Lauderdale and Radney Foster.
When it finally came time to head to the studio earlier this year, Knight already had Baird in mind as a producer. The two met during one of Knight’s first writers-in-the-round sessions at the Nashville nightclub 12th & Porter, when Baird heard him sing “William”. The song, which wound up being the closing track on Knight’s debut album, is an unsentimental narrative about a boyhood friend from an abusive family who might have “had a heart of gold” but winds up dead in a shootout anyway.
“By the time I got my jaw off the ground, he did a couple other songs, and I was just going, ‘Oh my God,'” Baird says. “I went up to him and told him I liked him a bunch.”
They hit it off and spent some time writing together. Baird quickly learned to respect, and accept, Knight’s judgment. “I wrote a line that was OK, not great, but it was OK,” Baird says. “Chris sang it and just looked up at me and said, ‘Naaaaw.’ And that was just it…He has a very strong sense of what’s right and wrong.”
Baird returned the honest appraisal when Knight’s first album came out. “There was a couple places I thought it didn’t quite capture Chris, and I was probably stupid and opened my big mouth,” Baird says. “And he didn’t hit me.” “I just called him up, see if he wanted to produce,” Knight says with a slight shrug.
Sonically, A Pretty Good Guy is rougher around the edges than the debut, less refined but more restrained. There are only a couple of rave-ups in the set, and even they carry a sense of foreboding. A couple of songs give prominence to Tammy Rogers’ brooding viola and violin, and “If I Were You” — a quietly menacing monologue in which a man on the street goes from begging for change to pulling a gun — strips it all the way down to Knight and his guitar. “This one’s sparser, a little dirtier,” Knight says of the album. “I don’t think it rocks as much as the first one.”
For his part, Baird says he mostly tried to keep the band (including bassist Keith Christopher and drummer Greg Morrow, as well as Baird himself on lead guitar) out of the way of the songs. “I wanted everybody to be able to listen and hear all the words he was saying and chew on what he just said,” Baird explains.
It can make for harrowing listening. Consider that “If I Were You” is followed by “North Dakota”, a tragic tale of a badlands farmer who loses his wife in a blizzard. Next up is “Highway Junkie”, a trucker’s lament about a bitter divorce, and then “Blame Me”, in which an absent husband’s neglect (emotional and financial) drives his wife to commit robbery and murder. Whew.
In concert, Knight promises to “mix them up.” “This album does have a beat,” he insists. “There’s a thing in the middle that I deliberately did, I come off of ‘Oil Patch Town,’ and then I did ‘Hard Candy’, and started going down to…” he pauses, and then decides he doesn’t need to complete the sentence. Down to wherever it is his characters go, wherever he goes to write the songs. “And I stayed down there for a long time, like four songs. I was a little bit worried about it, but that’s where I wanted it.
“But ‘The Lord’s Highway’ rocks a bit, ‘Becky’s Bible’, ‘Highway Junkie’. I can throw in stuff off my other album and keep people from slittin’ their throat, cuttin’ their wrists in the audience.” He laughs. “Right at the last minute, maybe.”
And then there’s the title track. Eaglesmith has been performing the song in concert for the last few years, and the differences between their versions highlight the things that set them apart. In Eaglesmith’s rendition, the narrator sounds almost cheerful, reminding his ex of everything good she left behind, confident about his future. Knight’s bare-bones Kentucky growl puts a different, more hard-won spin on it. He’s not just trying to convince his departed lover that he’s “a pretty good guy” — he’s trying to convince himself, too.
Considering the widespread acclaim and relatively strong sales Knight generated the first time out, expectations for A Pretty Good Guy could be daunting. Knight seems unfazed. “I’ll just keep on, see what I can do on the next album,” he says. “I don’t know. I’m not expecting anything. I got some shows, I’m working on getting a tour together. I’m not one to get my hopes up unrealistically.
