Chris Knight, The Jealous Kind (* * *) The Jealous Kind is a roots-rock road
album with more than its share of curves. Knight's characters all see a road
they think promises escape from their troubled, desperate lives. For the
farmer's son in Me and This Road, it's a never-ending ribbon of blacktop
that surely connects somewhere to the county road that stops just past his
house. For the family in the Grapes of Wrath-inspired Broken Plow, it's the
one that connects Dust Bowl Oklahoma with fertile California. Knight lets a
few of them escape, but more often they hit dead ends, and one is condemned
to haunt the same dark stretch of Dixie highway forever. —Mansfield