Chris Knight - "Heart of Stone"
This is album number six for Slaughters, Kentucky native Chris Knight, and he does what he’s done the previous five times out: write and sing like a young Steve Earle before Steve left the narratives of small town scrappers and losers behind him to take up the larger concerns of the big city and big-city politics.
Chris Knight doesn’t care much...
Americana singer/writer Knight’s debut, Chris Knight, was still two years away on the hot August day in 1996 when producer Frank Liddell (who’d later win acclaim with Lee Ann Womack and Miranda Lambert) set up a tape machine in Knight’s rural Kentucky trailer to capture him solo acoustic before Nashville tried to reshape him — if it could. Raw, scary and finally available to the general public...
The Trailer Tapes
Kentucky born and raised, Chris Knight makes straight-ahead country music dripping with heartache. He shuns the bright lights of Nashville and the glitz of LA, making music that is earthy, the moods often dark and biting. This is back roads country...tales of small-town life whre the stop signs are almost back-to-back. Song topics cover murder, familyeit s, old loves...
Chris Knight – The Trailer Tapes
Chris Knight’s four alt-country/rock albums are very fine, but nothing prepared me for the power of the utterly unadorned Trailer Tapes. Originally recorded as demos in his single-wide Kentucky house trailer in 1997, Knight brings a ravaged voice, a fine eye for detail, a compassionate heart, and a sardonic wit to the proceedings:
You say you’re...
Chris Knight has survived the "next Steve Earle" hype to forge a solid career as a plainspoken and hard-hitting country-rocker. The solo performances on The Trailer Tapes - they really were recorded in a trailer, in Knight's native Kentucky - were put down in 1996, before he cut the first of his four studio albums.
These 11 songs - three would reappear on his albums - set the template...
This is where it all began. In 1996, Chris Knight sat down in his rural Kentucky trailer with friend Frank Liddell, played his guitar and sang his songs. Tapes rolled that day, providing this great bare bones CD.
Only 3 of the 11 songs here were released on his prior studio records - acoustic versions of "Something Changed," his brilliant "House and 90 Acres" and the straight shooting...
Cold-eyed drifters, crooked yet sentimental cops, and prostitutes who kill their johns are characters in the brutal, deadpan songs of Chris Knight, a country singer from Kentucky whose oeuvre resembles Bruce Springsteen’s album “Nebraska” set in the South. --- Sisario
Chris Knight's not-to-be-missed 'Trailer Tapes'/
Let nothing get in the way of a great singer and his song - not excess instrumentation, padded production or distracting backup vocals.
Unfortunately, this stark approach seldom has a say in the slick music industry. But a new release from the arresting singer-songwriter Chris Knight was cut before he ever got signed. His "new" CD,...
"[These songs are] rich with imagery and the sound of hard living...Knight [has] established himself as a writer on the scale of Steve Earle and Kris Kristofferson."
-- Performing Songwriter, May 2007
Chris Knight / The Trailer Tapes
Drifters Church Records
In the summer of 1996, Houstonian Frank Liddell and a 22-year old engineer named Joe Hayden took some beer, guns, fishing poles, and a portable tape machine up to Chris Knight’s mobile home in Slaughter, Kentucky. Knight wasn’t on the national radar yet; that would come with the release of Chris Knight in 1998. But the...
