A couple years before releasing his 1998 Decca debut,
Chris Knight demoed some of his songs with that disc's eventual co-producer,
Frank Liddell. These were the days before computer software made it easy for home recording, so
Liddell wound up recording
Knight in an old trailer on
Knight's Kentucky farm. Ten years down the road, these tapes got cleaned up by ace engineer/producer
Ray Kennedy, and the results are quite wonderful. Only three of these 11 tunes ("Something Changed," "House and 90 Acres," and "If I Were You") later appeared on official
Knight releases, but there isn't a drop-off in quality with the previously unreleased songs.
The Trailer Tapes reveals
Knight already to be a mature, gifted songwriter. The territory that he has addressed throughout his career -- hard-living working men, heartbreak, and stifling small-town existence -- is all here in impressive form. The disc is packed with powerful portraits of rural working life. On tracks like "Backwater Blues" and "Here Comes the Rain," he eloquently uses nature metaphors (the river in the former and farming and rain in the latter) to discuss heartache. With "Hard Edges" and "Move On," he offers vividly detailed studies of small-town life. The
John Prine-ish "Hard Edges" poignantly profiles a woman who went from a grade-school ballerina to a blue-collar bar stripper, while "Move On" tackles the city-versus-country class struggle in the menacing tale of a bar fight. This tune, one of several mentioning pistols, contains a fine example of
Knight's "redneck" but sharp-edged writing in the couplet "You say you're from college/But you don't seem too bright/You just brung a switchblade/To a pistol fight."
Knight also tackles country versus city life in the memorable closing number, "My Only Prayer," where the Kentucky-based
Knight finds nothing to love in the big city. This moving lament also spotlights the disc's spare, almost rudimentary sound. Some reviews of his debut album noted that the standard country-rock arrangements distracted from
Knight's songs. Here, however, it is just
Knight singing to his acoustic guitar, allowing the listener's focus to fall on his ample songwriting talents. While his character-rich tunes and husky country twang reveal the influence of
Prine and, more prominently,
Steve Earle,
Knight demonstrates that he is a natural storyteller and chronicler of the rural life. Although these tracks started out as demos, they are worthy additions to
Knight's body of work. ~ Michael Berick