“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.”

Bio: Justin Baker

Winter 1996: Justin went rummaging through his basement, trying to find an old guitar case he’d spotted once before. Buried somewhere between molding boxes of old toys and family artifacts was a cardboard case with four rusted latches. Inside was a 1974 Ibanez Dreadnought, the Japanese guitar his mother purchased for his father decades before. The smell of spruce and mahogany, trapped in the case for years, rolled out in waves. A trip to the local music store for strings, and the journey began.

One becomes a fast student of the guitar when trying to learn the alien chord shapes and rhythmic patterns of Dave Matthews. After exhausting that musical catalogue, Justin returned to open chords and the powerful melodies of the folk, rock, and country music traditions. Once he mastered Neil Young’s “Out on the Weekend” he felt like he was on the right path.

Years of being bad at playing the guitar slowly turned into years of being okay. He could passably sing and play, and that was more than enough.

Summer 1999: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five turned words into art, and Justin grew from a reluctant reader into a lover of books. Vonnegut led to Salinger led to Faulkner led to Hemingway led to Morrison led to Huxley led to Palahniuk led to Rimbaud led to Ginsberg led to Baldwin led to Conrad led to Fitzgerald led to DeLillo led to Dostoevsky led to Dideon led to Kundera led to Roth led to Carver led to Ellison led to Camus led to Bukowski led to Nabakov led to McCarthy. There were stories everywhere on the library shelves and all manner of ways to tell them.

The rhythm of storytelling moved back and forth from page to guitar and felt like existence.

Fall 2000: In college Justin befriended fellow musician Josh Kaufman, and they spent late nights together playing, trading songs, and writing a few. Justin’s college baseball teammate, J Seger, put down his guitar for a Fender precision bass, and the trio had a rhythm section. Following an acoustic set on campus, Reno Brown joined the group as the drummer. For a few years the band, dubbed Ten Stories Tall, played shows around Baltimore and the Mid-Atlantic, attracting a comforting following. After graduation, though, everyone went their own way.

But the high of writing songs and playing them for a crowd is hard to shake.

Adulting: What does an unemployed college grad who loves music and literature do? He teaches. Since 2004, Justin has taught literature to high school students. Since 2007, he’s taught American literature of the 1960s, philosophy, and the dense, penetrating works of Cormac McCarthy at the Gilman School in Baltimore, MD. He published some poetry somewhere in there and pursued that cliched dream of English majors everywhere — writing a novel.

Spring 2013: His wife pregnant with their first child, Justin wanted to do something special for her as a gift, something to welcome this new life into the world. He picked up his guitar and started writing. The mystical feeling of melody turning into language turning into song was intoxicating. He lingered in the tower of song and kept writing. One song bred two more, and pretty soon Justin had a pile of songs that he could hang his hat on.

Fall 2019: As luck would have it, J Seger, his college friend and bass player from Ten Stories Tall, had moved from Brooklyn, NY, to Asheville, NC, with his talented wife Emily Easterly and built a studio. He traveled to JEm Yard Studios in Asheville and recorded five songs. The world shut down during the blooming spring of 2020. During the summer of 2021, Justin returned to Asheville to record six more songs. The music created during those six days (separated by more than a year of the plague) is called Buyer’s Remorse.

Fall 2022: After getting back into the Baltimore music scene, Justin met Tony Correlli, a local musician, songwriter, producer, and studio owner. In November of 2022, he started tracking a new batch of songs at Deep End Studio. Working with a team of talented, local musicians and singers, Justin finished recording his second album, Ornamental Monsters, in the fall of 2023.

Describing the process of writing songs, Leonard Cohen mused, there are “no rewards other than the work itself.” Thus, the work continues.