Posted On: Sunday, Dec 16th, 2007

Cross Canadian Ragweed single coming in January. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Vpfj-S9Fc&feature=related

Posted On: Wednesday, Nov 14th, 2007

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, 11-track The Trailer Tapes contains only three songs on his four subsequent CDs.

A college grad from a coal-mining family, Knight (then age 36) was a mine reclamation inspector making forays to Nashville to pitch his songs, perhaps not fully aware that it’s his own twangy, no-nonsense baritone that best does his stubborn, ornery characters justice — not that there’s much justice in his plots.
Understanding the merits of suspense, he’ll leave listeners wondering if a story’s potential bloodshed ensues after the lyric ends. From a redneck bar with a shot-out jukebox, “Move On” seethes social-class conflict beneath competition for a babe. Destitute but still polite, a street robber calls his victim “Sir” in “If I Were You.” Knight’s sympathetic to his female characters pushed to desperate measures. “Rita’s Only Fault” (like A Pretty Good Guy’s “Blame Me”) has a devoted guy willing to take the rap for a woman he loves.

Comparisons to Steve Earle are inevitable, especially since they used to look a bit alike. Earle’s producer Ray Kennedy has remixed The Trailer Tapes — removing noise like the guitar hitting the mic stand — for a clean sound that feels like Knight’s in a room with you. Being alone in a room with a Knight CD seems safer than being alone with some of his gothic characters. --- Bruce Sylvester

Posted On: Friday, Aug 24th, 2007

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 and how some families have devoted their lives to working the land only for the bank to foreclose.
Unrelenting in his vocal style, Knight yields nothing in his desire to tell his stories in a simple and direct fashion, none finer than 'Here Comes The Rain' and Rita's Only Fault'. Not intended for commercial release originally, after eleven years in storage and with a little arm-twisting Knight has relinquished the recordings and allowed us to enjoy a real treat. Nashville, eat your hearts out, for this is how real country music should sound
---- Maurice Hope 9/2007

Posted On: Saturday, Aug 11th, 2007

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 from college
But you don’t seem too bright
You just brung a switchblade
To a pistol fight
These are tales of small town losers and drifters, little-girl ballerinas who turn into strippers to make ends meet, women who murder their abusive husbands, lost good ol’ boys adrift in big-city canyons. It’s just Chris’s acoustic guitar, his brutal songs, and that plaintive rasp, which is a dead ringer for Steve Earle. But it’s no crime to do a Steve Earle impersonation, particularly when you’ve been doing Steve Earle better than Steve Earle over the past four or five years --- Paste

Posted On: Monday, Apr 23rd, 2007

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 for his work: Knight, a former coal-mine-reclamation inspector, writes mostly dark tales of rural guys struggling to come to grips with change and loss, and the desperate measures they - and their women - can be driven to. Much as on Springsteen's Nebraska, the solo settings underscore the stark, brutally honest nature of Knight's songs and his delivery of them.
--- Nick Cristiano

Posted On: Monday, Apr 16th, 2007

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 "If I Were You".
Knight displays his keen ability to tell stories, creating imagery that makes it seem like he is living the song. From the opening growls in the first song "Backwater Blues," "Where the hells the sun, think its rained for days," Knight shows his rough edges along the way. Knight sings of hard relationships in "Rita's Only Fault" and standing one's ground in a bar with "Move On" as Knight states "I've got a pistol, all you've gots a knife, so you better move on, if it ain't worth your life." Only in the final song "My Only Prayer," does Knight wind down and takes listeners back safely to our sweet Kentucky home.
This is an essential addition to any listener who likes hard-nosed bare boned folk/country music.
----John Walker

Posted On: Sunday, Apr 1st, 2007

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

Posted On: Friday, Mar 30th, 2007

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, featuring just Knight's voice and an acoustic guitar, was recorded in a decrepit trailer in 1996, back when he had barely played clubs, let alone entered a studio. This Tuesday, "The Trailer Tapes" finally hits stores, and it's something no lover of great American music should miss.

All those who cherish the work of Steve Earle will fall for Knight's husky voice and hard vision. Knight, who has since become a mature Americana cult star, specialized in songs of violence at the start of his career. The "Tapes" CD includes tales of a man you wouldn't want to cross in a bar, a battered woman who finally takes down her abuser and a host of folks reeling from the deforming aftermath of lost loves.

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

Posted On: Thursday, Mar 29th, 2007

"[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

Posted On: Tuesday, Feb 20th, 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 wheels for Knight’s career were already in motion and to Liddell it was apparent that Knight’s life was about to change drastically. Liddell recalls the spirit of recording Knight in the very mobile home where he wrote this first batch of songs as “fun and hobby-esque.” After Knight’s first album skyrocketed him to the top of the Americana scene, the tapes became the stuff of Nashville rumor and legend. Some leaked out over the years, passed from hand to hand.

Publicists and critics like to toss around phrases like “sounds like it was recorded in the living room,” but The Trailer Tapes actually was. It’s just Knight and his guitar, and from the chilling opening growl of “where the hell’s the sun” Knight is as compelling as anyone on the scene. While critics have for years repeated a mantra that Knight sounds like Steve Earle, John Mellencamp, John Prine, and Bruce Springsteen, on this one Knight reminds me of Hank Williams with a gun and a Vicodin ‘script. There’s pain, anger, and surly I-don’t-give-a-damn unreasonableness in Knight’s throat, an end of the world voice reminiscent of author Robert Stone. Only three of these raw-bone songs – “Something Changed,” “House and 90 Acres,” and “If I Were You” — have made it on to Knight’s studio records, and that’s a shame because “Rita’s Only Fault” and “Move On” are lawless, real, and dangerous as a rusty razor in a speed freak’s pocket. With lines like “I’ve got a pistol, all you’ve got is a knife / so you better move on if it ain’t worth your life,” these trailer tapes make for absolutely essential Chris Knight, one of the edgiest writers ever to hit Nashville. —
William Michael Smith