“I know what I feel about the album, just like I knew what I felt about my first one. At this point, my mind can’t be changed. I respect anybody’s opinion. But I know what I’ve done here, for myself.”
What he’s done means more than just recording this album. Knight could have just been another character in his songs, a good ol’ boy punching the clock and paying for diapers and beer at the Sav-A-Lot. His father was a pipe liner, and even though Knight and his brothers went to college, they didn’t wander far afield. Knight majored in agriculture at Western Kentucky University, then went to work for Kentucky’s Department of Surface Mining, supervising mine operations and cleanups. His brothers all still live nearby; a sister has moved to northern Kentucky, near Cincinnati.
But Knight always had other inclinations. He taught himself to play guitar with a book of John Prine songs. He told his father apologetically that he wasn’t sure he wanted just an eight-hour-a-day job. His parents, he says, have always been supportive. “They really encouraged it. I played the guitar all night long. They’d be in the next room. They never said, ‘Put it up.'”
And when he heard Steve Earle’s Guitar Town, he knew for sure what he wanted to do. In Earle’s unadorned lyricism, he found the same thing he admired in his favorite writers, authors such as Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy: the rough details of life, familiar pictures of the real world. “Some of the simplest things in Cormac McCarthy’s books just make the hair stand up on my head because he delivers it,” Knight says. “He sets it up and he delivers the line so well. It’s placement or something.”
Knight has adopted some of that delivery and made it his own. His sparse lyrics don’t overwhelm you with imagery and metaphor the way McCarthy’s prose can, but they share a similar specificity and precision. “Becky’s Bible”, the first track on A Pretty Good Guy, opens with the immaculately descriptive line, “Empty beer bottles rattle on my pistol/On the seat of my Chevy pickup truck.”
“People have told me for seven or eight years that I write songs from the middle or from the ending,” he says. “Maybe the standard way to write songs is from the beginning to the end. I figured ‘Empty beer bottles rattle on my pistol’ might get somebody’s attention, you know? Instead of, ‘Well, we were sitting at a card game and so-and-so said I was cheating and we pulled our guns.'”
Knight thinks just as hard about how the stories end. And for all its blood and grim desperation, A Pretty Good Guy manages to wind up on a note of hard-earned redemption. The narrator of “The Lord’s Highway” tells us he “used to burn the devil’s gasoline” and “pack an old switchblade,” but he has seen the light. The last words on the album: “I will not fear no fires of hell/When I’m on my dying bed/’Cause St. Peter’s at the pearly gate/Saying traveler come ahead/You’re on the Lord’s highway.”
“That’s the only hope anyway,” Knight says matter-of-factly. “For anything. These people, they can come right out of everything they’ve gone through and be fine.”
Don’t consider him an evangelist, though, or even a man of religion. “I am somewhere,” he says slowly. “But not…I don’t feel like I’m a good person. That’s something I want to be, I would like to be. Maybe I will be. There was a lot of religion, my mother and father went to church, took us to church, all that. My dad, he’s come back to it. They did their job. But it’s just like the working thing — it’s there, I just don’t know how it all fits in. I go back and forth between being an irresponsible musician to trying to be like the daddy in To Kill A Mockingbird.
He pauses, one of those long pauses. “I’ve got to find my own way instead of just dressing different, cutting my hair and shaving every day and going to church every Sunday,” he says. “It’s got to be kind of a natural thing for me.”
Jesse Fox Mayshark was raised by Buddhist vegetarian war resistors in the vineyards of western New York. He currently subsists on moonshine and barbecued tofu in Knoxville, Tennessee.
