The Daily Times (Maryville, TN)
http://thedailytimes.com/
Death just doesn't hold the same appeal for Chris Knight as it used to.Not that Knight was a morbid guy -- he's not, and likely never has been, cut from the cloth of death metal or gothic rock or anything similar. He'd look about as natural wearing black eyeliner and painted black fingernails as The Cure's Robert Smith would in a weightlifting contest.
But Knight has always been drawn to the darker fabric of life in the South. Perhaps it was his rural, hardscrabble upbringing; perhaps it was the anger he felt at those who looked down there noses at a simple Kentucky boy who sought his way in the bright lights of bigger cities like Bowling Green or Nashville.
Whatever the case, Knight's early albums were dark and gritty portraits of shifty-eyed men, desperate women, hard times and rough nights. His songwriting was stark and vivid, his characters so real they seem to have been lifted from the corner market or small-town gas station or roadside honky tonk that most Southerners have drifted through over the years.
Somewhere around his record "The Jealous Kind," however, Knight lost his taste for the dark stuff -- the killers and bad men who populated his songs in the same way they do the stories of contemporary Southern gothic writers Chris Offutt, Tom Franklin and Larry Brown. His focus began to shift, and these days, he doesn't care too much about revisiting that well from which he drew his water.
"The story songs are probably less violent and intense, because I feel like I've covered that ground pretty good, and now I'm having to come at things from a little different angle," Knight told The Daily Times this week. "I'll start with a hook and write around it and try to stay away from previous topics. It's harder to come up with stuff to write about; I had all these stories I needed to write up until this point, but now I've got to look a little harder for ways to write a song.
"I just don't feel compelled to write about it so much. The older I get, the less angry I am, and I've got to leave some of that stuff behind. I haven't left it all behind -- I still love those songs, and I love to play them for people. I can play them night after night, and they don't get stale.
"But I can't go back to that same place," he added. "I can't go back to really being that guy in 'Down the River' anymore. I've written two or three songs with that guy in mind, and it feels like it's enough."
Knight's humble drawl and stoic attitude reflect the roughshod, ramshackle nature of his rural upbringing in Kentucky. Born in 1960, he cut his teeth first on the country of his mother and father, and later on the folk-rock music of master songwriters like John Prine and J.J. Cale. At 15, he took over his brother's guitar, and his sibling, who worked the second shift in the nearby coal mines, took notice of Knight's growing talent.
Encouraged by his family, he tinkered with music until after graduation from Western Kentucky University, when he threw himself full-time into writing. Working for the Kentucky Department for Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, he wrote on the side, submitting his songs to Nashville. Urged on by those impressed with his abilities, he took the plunge in 1994, quitting his job and landing work as a songwriter with a publishing contract.But the music just didn't sound right without Knight's world-weary voice to lend it credence. Encouraged to cut his own record, he sat down and recorded a self-titled album in 1998. That was followed by "A Pretty Good Guy" and "The Jealous Kind," released in 2003 to critical acclaim. "Enough Rope" was released in 2005, followed by "The Trailer Tapes" -- a collection of early demos -- and "Heart of Stone," which hits stores on Tuesday.
"I used my road drummer and my guitar player, and we just went in there and sat down on the floor and played the songs as a band until we felt like we got the feel we wanted," he said. "Then we went in, everybody went in to their places, and we tracked them. We even recorded the practice stuff, so we could go back to something if we forgot how it went."
The album is as solid an effort as Knight has ever done -- and that's saying a lot, given his proclivity to capture mood and spirit and the human heart like a Kentucky-born version of Bruce Springsteen. There's a gift that good Southern writers have, an ability to see beyond the surface of things and connect the landscape in which they live with the raging tempest of the human spirit.
Such insight accounts for the term "Southern gothic," used to describe so many tales of the darker side of the South, and it's not limited to novelists. Knight possesses it, and it's one of the reasons his brand of country music is some of the best outside-the-mainstream traditional country being made these days. They're tales of stragglers and survivors, some from Knight's life, others a compilation of characters he's met over the years.
"When I was younger, I wasn't ever really angry, but I come from a real small town," he said. "I grew up in the woods, and when I went to college in Bowling Green, I never realized that people actually though I was dumb just because I came from real life. And so I started thinking, you know, that I would just stay quiet about it and let them think I'm dumb.
"All along, I was thinking that they're no better than I am, and I fed off of that kind of thing, that kind of anger, for a while. I still do once in a while, but that stuff's not as important to me anymore. It doesn't matter as much, so I'm not as intense about it anymore."
As he gets older, he said, he's turning his artistic eye more and more toward those characters and the lives they live rather than the darkness that lurks within their hearts. "Heart of Stone" is replete with such tales -- from the overwhelming melancholy of the title track, the story of a man who finds himself more like the hard-drinking father who abandoned him than he cares to admit ... to "Hell Ain't Half Full," about a methamphetamine manufacturer ... to "Miles to Memphis," a combination road song/lost-love ballad that a sublime combination of both.
Like many of his Southern contemporaries, both in the literary and music worlds, Knight tends to gravitate toward darker subject matter. It's not that he has a dour outlook on life -- it's just his gift, the ability to get across with three chords and few worlds the struggles of rural Southern life.He's reluctant to look at his talent that way -- to him, it's not a gift, merely a way for him to channel his experiences and observations into something that others appreciate.
"I just want to keep writing decent songs that I want to record and people want to listen to," he said. "That's what's real important to me now. I hope I've got several more albums in me, and I've already written three songs I want to record for my next one. I just want to keep on making it work, and hopefully making people happy with whatever they get out of my music when they listen to it."
But as he's grown older, he's mellowed out some as well, he admitted. And while the dark side of life might always appeal to him, the darker side of human nature, on the other hand, is loosening its grip on his muse.
"I was writing with a guy a couple of weeks ago, and he had an idea for a song about a guy who had a terminal disease or something," Knight said. "I stopped him right there and said, 'I'd kinda like to stay away from death today.' So we wrote another song, which is better.
"I'm just seeing what else I can come up with. There's a lot of art involved in writing a good story-song, but there's also art in writing a good groove tune that people like, or a hook that makes them want to sing along, without it being fluff or plastic."
Originally published: August 29. 2008 3:01AM
Last modified: August 28. 2008 2:27PM
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