**Chris Knight live at Eddie's Attic!** After 23 years as a recording
artist, singer-songwriter Chris Knight remains boldly empowered to
make music that always delivers the unflinching truth. In fact, the
man raised in Slaughters, Kentucky uses a simple, direct barometer to
regularly check his muse: “If I can’t believe myself, I won’t
sing the song.” That brutally honest, no-frills philosophy fits his
Americana-fueled, backwoods-grown merger of folk, country, and rock.
It’s been at the backbone of nine studio albums, beginning with
1998’s acclaimed self-titled debut and traveling through scorchers
such as the one-two punch of 2001’s A Pretty Good Guy and 2003’s
The Jealous Kind, two demo-styled discs (2007’s The Trailer Tapes
and 2009’s Trailer II), and the recent, electric guitar-fortified
opus, 2019’s Almost Daylight.
Because Knight’s music has
always sat outside of the mainstream, onstage is where he makes his
fans one show at a time. It is exactly where his searing tales of
rural characters, fringe survivors, and tumultuous small-town
existence find a captivated audience. A few edgy, raw gems that
immediately come to mind are “It Ain’t Easy Being Me,” “Carla
Came Home,” “I’m William Callahan,” and “Everybody’s
Lonely Now,” the latter two from Almost Daylight. “I’ve written
songs about a lot of different things going all the way back to my
first record,” he says, “and some folks still think ‘somebody
kills somebody’ is all I write about.” What Knight writes about is
what he knows. He was raised in mining country, so it’s no surprise
that he would earn a degree in agriculture from Western Kentucky
University and then work as a mine reclamation inspector and then
miner’s consultant. But eventually his passion for writing songs and
playing guitar, both inspired by his musical hero, the late John
Prine, led him to chronicle his surroundings in words and music. “I
came from a big family and grew up in the woods six miles from two
small towns, so there were a lot of stories,” he says. “There were
always a lot of ideas to write about.”
Those ideas have earned
Knight praise from publications such as The New York Times (“the
last of a dying breed…a taciturn loner with an acoustic guitar and a
college degree”) and USA Today (“a storyteller in the best
traditions of Mellencamp and Springsteen”), to name a few. Like his
beloved Prine, whom Knight duets with on Prine’s chestnut “Mexican
Home,” the cut that closes Almost Daylight, Knight fits comfortably
in Texas honky-tonks, downtown Nashville venues, and cool Manhattan
rock clubs.
It’s no wonder that Knight has single-handedly
scraped a reputation as one of America’s most uncompromising and
respected singer-songwriters through 23 years and nine studio albums.
He’s done this minus fanfare and artifice. The native son of
Slaughters, Kentucky (population: 238) only sings songs he believes.
He also speaks only when he has a potent message.
“If I
don’t have something worth saying, I’m not opening my mouth. I
haven’t suited everybody, but every time I get a new fan it tells me
I’m doing something right. I think all my records have set a
precedent, if only for me at the very least. I just want people to
think the latest one stands up to everything else I’ve done.”
Presented by Eddie's Attic. This is an all ages event.
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10/07/2025 Last update