Chris Knight Preview

Chris Knight
Old Town School Of Folk Music, Chicago
Sunday, April 15, 2007

No, this isn’t the guy who played Peter in “The Brady Bunch.” Wrong Chris Knight.

The Chris Knight performing at Old Town School Of Folk is likely to put you in a much worse mood. There’s a reason this Kentucky singer-songwriter’s material bristles with all the joy and optimism of a Steve Earle record: Earle was one of Knight’s biggest influences. As the story goes, Knight decided to write his own songs after hearing Earle on the radio.

And Knight’s most recent release, The Trailer Tapes (Drifter’s Church), is chock full of cheer. There’s a song about a hating your shitty job (“Spike Driving Blues”), one about a homicidal high school sweetheart (“Rita’s Only Fault”), the human tendency to dislike people we don’t understand (“Move On”), and a stripper with few remaining outs in life (“Hard Edges”). But it isn’t the recordings themselves that are the story behind The Trailer Tapes as much as the way they were captured. Though Knight is now a known and respected songwriter, back in 1996 he was living in a trailer (not even a doublewide) in a small Kentucky mining town. Frank Liddell, one of the album’s producers, was also an unknown commodity then (now he is a Grammy-winner), and the duo, along with Joe Hayden, recorded the whole thing crammed in that trailer, in the middle of summer, with no air conditioning or fans, and with two microphones and an ADAT machine. Such raw conditions sure translated to the primal, brutally honest performances by Knight on these 10 tracks, eight of which are heard here for the first time.

Knight, along with Rodney Crowell, is part of Robbie Fulks’ Secret Country night.

— Trevor Fisher

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly