Chris Knight – The River’s Own
Real. Knight’s best songs are short stories, plain, lyric glimpses into desperate lives, coiled violence, the cockroach-endurance of the stomped-upon and still hobbled working poor. Told honest, though a good writer is inevitably a great liar. That is, these characters are fully imagined, “You know, people that I’ve known, family ‘n’ friends and just people I grew up with.” These are not, then, lives Knight has lived, but characters he is able to inhabit for the duration of the song.
And so, on “Bring The Harvest Home”, he is able to write with disdain of Los Angeles, though he’s never been that far west (presumably co-writer Craig Wiseman has been).
“No, I’ve just heard about it,” he chuckles. “I heard about it enough to write that I didn’t like it. I seen it on TV.”
How much traveling have you done?
“Not much. I’ve been to Florida. I just came back from Wichita this morning; I was opening for Emmylou Harris last night, so I went to a motel, and got up at 4:30 this morning, flew back here. Oh, Little Rock, Arkansas. I drove there to open for Alison Krauss. Went to St. Louis to get a few ballgames in.”
Roots. In a rootless, relentless, postmodern world, so many centers spinning by all at once that there is no center and nothing to do but catch as catch can and hope, Chris Knight seems to know exactly who he is and precisely what he does.
And yet, “If I Were You” is not on his debut. Nor is a song written with Eaglesmith called “Blame Me”, a brutal portrait of a single mother driven to armed robbery and her husband too late returning to accept responsibility.
This is unfair. The writer has songs the reader will never hear, except perhaps in concert, or, maybe, on the next record, but too many of those tapes on the floor hold songs that were meant for the next record. The result being that Chris Knight’s official debut is being compared to a demo recorded, as Knight says, “in two sessions up in Kentucky. Just guitar-vocals. We’d go for a couple of days, just drinking beer and running the tape machine.”
We come here to the crux, for both the singer and the critic are also capitalists. It is at this point that the art of the song and the commerce of selling music diverge. Nobody — be clear about this, please — nobody is wrong, here. There are choices to be made, and they are not easy.
But here’s the thing: Those Trailer Tapes? They really are as good as if Steve Earle had cut Nebraska. Decca could have chosen to release an album as striking, as powerful, and as enduring as the debut of John Prine, one of the songwriters whose work inescapably informs Knight’s. It could have been a classic. Hell, it is a classic, except that nobody seems likely to hear it.
Decca nearly did take that plunge. After all, they paid for (and, thus, own) The Trailer Tapes. “I thought it would be cool if we got all of this stuff on tape before he was a star,” Liddell explains, “before he was a major recording artist. So that we have it in its most basic and innocent form, as opposed to going back and revisiting and trying to do something contrived later on. And I thought it would be something we could use initially, maybe it would be even like a pre-release or something, or an original label. And I think…the label sort of vetoed that ultimately.”
Pity.
In the end, “If I Were You” didn’t make Knight’s debut because the properly recorded versions didn’t quite fit. “We cut a really cool track,” Liddell explains, “but we felt like it was a little too heavy-handed and took away from the lyric of the song. When we started mixing the record and mixed ‘If I Were You’, we felt like it didn’t do the song justice. So we went back and booked another session. We sat there one night for three or four or five hours recording ‘If I Were You’ over and over again. Well, I think we finally got something, but in a weird way I think everybody’s interpretation of that song might be a little bit different…We had spent so much money at that point that we figured we’d go back and get it for the next record.”
In fairness the producers, the label, the management company, the artist even — whoever makes these calls — haven’t too conspicuously gussied up Knight’s songs. They’ve added drums, some prominent session guitar players (David Grissom, Kenny Greenburg, Richard Bennett), that’s about it. Recorded live, with very few overdubs. “There’s no lies in any of these songs,” Liddell says. “None of the songs were rewritten or sugar-coated so that we could possibly get airplay. I mean, we cut what Chris Knight wanted to cut, for the most part. If somebody gets killed in a song, they’re going to get killed in the song and that’s it.”
Still, Knight is a striking artist all on his own. The drums and the supporting players pin him to a tempo, and sometimes that’s not how the cadence of the song naturally falls. And they drape the trappings of ordinariness around work which is not at all ordinary. Somehow the presence of these first-class players, whose sound and confidence is comfortingly familiar, works against the rough urgency (and uncertainty, even) of Knight’s songs. Especially the drums, so cleanly and conventionally striking two and four.
Then there is the matter of song selection. The most gutty, gripping, challenging songs from The Trailer Tapes do not appear here. This may all be accident, fate, the logic of assembling a coherent opening work. But instead of his strikingly dark compositions we are left Knight’s more anthemic, ordinary tracks, paeans to small farmers and land, love and losers. The most conventional of his works (and this is still relative, mind you), are displayed here, songs that might brush up against Travis Tritt and not jump too far back into the shadows. Knight’s best songs are of the present, and most of what’s on his debut is like a memory painting, an idealized re-creation of the past.
And yet this, too, is inescapably the reality of producing country music for a major label: If radio won’t play it, it’s dead. One is mindful of what the daily papers here in Nashville remind, that most country singers don’t recoup until their record has gone gold. These are not, then, casual choices.
“Are they going to play him?” Liddell asks, and remember that he has earlier said he believes Knight will become a major artist, while spending much of his last five years working toward that goal. “I doubt very seriously that [radio’s] going to play him initially. I think Chris is country. Is Chris what some of these guys are playing right now?” Liddell works around the subject for a while. “Chris is country, and his lyrics are reflective of who he is and what he’s seen and where he’s grown up. And he lives in Slaughters, Kentucky, a town of 400 or so. Is that not country? I could say a whole lot but I’d probably get in trouble. There’s a lot of things on country radio that are not country.
“Very few things I hear right now are real. There’s people that want to be stars, not people that want to be artists. Chris Knight can take making this record or leave it. His artistry, if he sat out there on his front porch the rest of his life and went back to inspecting coal mines, he wouldn’t leave himself short at all.”
Maybe not. But if that’s where Chris Knight ends up, sitting on his front porch picking, somebody best bring a tape recorder by every week or two.
No Depression co-editor Grant Alden believes that clutter and chaos are prerequisites for inspiration. Either that or he can’t afford a maid.