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Knight's roots take stage

By Dan Craft
dcraft@pantagraph.com

Recent McLean County Fair headliner John Anderson has inspired a generation of young admirers/collaborators, including up-and-comers like Jason Aldean, who headlined his own show just days later at the U.S. Cellular Coliseum.

By either coincidence or plain old good karma, another of Anderson's acolytes will be among us this weekend: acclaimed singer-songwriter Chris Knight, who co-wrote "It Ain't Easy Being Me" for Anderson.

"Well, John Anderson is one of the best country singers there ever was back in the '80s, and yeah, to have him record one of my songs was a big honor for me and I told him that," says the fan.

One of the American roots music scene's emerging heroes, Knight and his band will headline their own show at 8 p.m. Sunday at Bloomington's New Lafayette Club as a kickoff for next weekend's William F. Brady Day of the Dozer Community Cancer Benefit (Aug. 23 at Bloomington's Interstate Center).

The WWHP-FM-sponsored show will also serve as a CD release party for Knight's latest release, "Heart of Stone," due in stores Aug. 19 and produced by the Georgia Satellites' Dan Baird.

As this resolutely rural-loving Kentucky native tells it, he's still not 100 percent sure he's a natural-born stage presence -- never mind that he's been at it himself for a good 11 years now.

Moreover, he's been compared to everyone from Steve Earle to Johnny Cash to Bruce Springsteen courtesy his stark, no-frills singer-songwriter aesthetic, a creative crossroads "where Cormac McCarthy meets 'Copperhead Road,'" mused one critic.

Veteran Village Voice music scribe Robert Christgau goes so far to observe that put head-to-head with guys like John Prine and Freedy Johnston "on the wrong Saturday night ... he might be inclined to kick both their a---s."

Even so, "I'm still not totally comfortable on stage," the 48-year-old Knight notes in a phone interview at his home far from the madding crowd.

"Sometimes I am (comfortable), but it really takes a certain kind of personality to do it, and I'm not as good as most people," he continues in a voice with no smooth edges whatsoever.

Others would disagree, of course, including the many performers who are fans of Knight's songs, including Montgomery Gentry, whose rendition of Knight's "She Couldn't Change Me" gave all parties involved a big hit.

He says he was happy toiling as a songwriter for the likes of Anderson, Gentry, Randy Travis and others when he headed to Nashville 22 years ago, inspired by hearing Steve Earle on the radio.

Though the native of Slaughters, Ky., a mining town of 200, had an agriculture degree from Western Kentucky University in hand, worked as mine reclamation inspector and still lived in a trailer home situated on 90 acres, he forced himself to go.

When he headed to Nashville, it was basically "this is what I've got and do you like it or don't you like it?"

Those who liked it won out.

"It wasn't like I was going there trying to pull anything over on anybody. I was just myself. I try not to suck up to anybody. But I hooked up with some really good people who liked what I did."

What he did, and does, was remain true to his stark, city-free roots.

Though Knight's lean songs rock with the best of them at times, "for the most part, my music is rural -- I can't get away from where I was raised. Although I don't come from a farm, my family always lived way out in the nowhere, with nobody else around me. There were maybe one or two cars that would come down the road in a day, and that would be all the people you'd see."

That sense of deep isolation and removal is one that has permeated much of Knight's sonic and lyrical landscape over the course of five albums, where the ruminations come bearing titles like "Home Sick Gypsy," "Go On Home" and "Heart of Stone."

What Knight hasn't taken away from his city sojourns are the bad habits that have led to so much of today's commercial country sounds becoming what he calls "so plastic and fake -- there's nothing real anymore."

For Knight, the Kentucky mining town loner who's not sure he's comfortable on a stage, even 10 years later, only one thing matters: "I want to be able to believe the voice that's singing. When Waylon sings ... you hear the swagger. In most of the songs today, it's all a joke."

For Chris Knight, the act of songwriting and singing is anything but.

At a glance

What: Chris Knight

When: 8 p.m. Sunday

Where: New Lafayette Club, 1600 S. Main St., Bloomington

Tickets: Advance, $15; at door, $17

Ticket information: (309) 828-1212

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Roots singer Chris Knight began his career writing hits for other country singers, like recent McLean County Fair headliner John Anderson, before embarking on his own solo career. (For the Pantagraph)

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