Welcome to Sorryville: A Chris Knight Retrospective, Part 3
On bypassing Nashville, inevitable self-destruction, and taking life as it comes
Read the first two entries here:
Part One — Kentucky’s Unsung Songwriter: A Chris Knight Retrospective, Part 1
Part Two — Riding Hard Luck: A Chris Knight Retrospective, Part 2
Some Dreams Don’t Come True
From Chris Knight at his most celebratory on “Oil Patch Town” we move to Chris Knight at his most reflective and most profound. “Enough Rope” is the song at the live show that, each time I’ve seen him, the whole crowd sings every single word right back to him. Each couplet in the song is a revelation. Every image crystallizes in the listener’s mind as it rolls off his tongue. I don’t mean to overstate it, but it’s moments like this when the show feels almost church-like. How else does one describe a room full of people singing every word of a song at the top of their lungs, some of them with tears in their eyes? (Not me. Never.) It’s what inspired one of my best tweets: “If you watch videos of the Asbury Revival, that’s how I feel at every Chris Knight show I’ve ever been to.” I was being a little snarky, sure, but I was also being honest.
Knight performed this song back in 2006 on the country music television network Great American Country (GAC). Back then, when the channel and it’s more popular cousin, CMT (Country Music Television), actually played music videos (a la MTV in the nineties and early 2000s), both stations had shows that featured artists on the fringes of the mainstream. CMT’s was called Wide Open Country and GAC’s was called Edge of Country. And truth be told, this is where most of the best country, roots, and singer-songwriter music was found, played by artists who were a little too artsy playing their songs that were a little too nuanced, a little too unpolished. They were relegated to the fringes because radio programmers didn’t think the masses would latch on.
But eventually the masses did. These kinds of artists are soaring in popularity now despite little push still from mainstream country radio, artists like Tyler Childers, Turnpike Troubadours, Jason Isbell, and Charlie Crockett, to name just a few. In some cases these “artists on the fringe” are selling more tickets to concerts than their mainstream counterparts. In the late aughts they’d have been played on Edge of Country, maybe even invited to perform in a plush Nashville studio like Chris Knight was. It’s a little bizarre to see Knight sitting on the bright red, extremely modern couch, engulfed by studio lighting, but he looks comfortable. Every time I watch the video I think it’s incredible that someone with that thick Kentucky drawl and utterly unhurried pace to their words was able to get on TV. He’s got to be a modern-day talk show producer’s worst nightmare.
As Knight explains that he got the idea for the song (which he co-wrote with Austin Cunningham, it must be noted) when he ran into somebody he used to play Little League baseball with, interviewer Kylie Harris seems quietly thrilled as he talks. She remains so throughout the performance, in which Knight sings about a man whose life accelerates by means of taking each day as it comes, deliberately, without flash. He finds out his girlfriend is pregnant on his 18th birthday, marries her because that’s what “you’re supposed to do,” and they end up staying in his hometown where he works construction for the city. He’s not someone who bolted—because he couldn’t—for the big city life when he finished school. His life may not have taken shape as he had planned, but he’s got a job and he’s not in prison like his cousin. The chorus is a declaration of hard-won gratitude in the face of always never really having a whole lot:
But I’m thankful for the things I have
And all the things I don’t
I’ve got dreams that will come true
And I’ve got some that won’t
But most the time I just walk the line wherever it goes
‘Cause you can’t hang yourself if you ain’t got enough rope
An Anthem for Fools
I just can’t help it, this one is my favorite. As someone who takes pride in his contrarian tendencies, I have no shame in admitting that my favorite Chris Knight song is one of his most popular, if not the most popular. Co-written with Craig Wiseman, “It Ain’t Easy Being Me” is an anthem for the mistake-prone and the self-destructive, and for my money, one of the cleverest songs ever written.
The narrator is mayor of the town of “Sorryville,” which you won’t find on Google Maps, you may have already deduced, because it’s fictional: “You might say that it don’t exist / But if you make enough wrong turns it’d be hard to miss.” He makes a spectacle out of burning bridges, so much so that if he ever had one dedicated to him, he’d “probably come to the ceremony with a can of gasoline.” And he’s a freak, star of his own one-man one-room circus show, and in the middle of that room is “a big red button that says ‘Danger, do not touch’ / And twice a day I’d mash it down and you could watch me self-destruct.’” That visual gets me every time. It’s such an encapsulation of how I’ve felt at certain times in my life, like it was a given that I was going to make a decision that would wreck everything. So I’d might as well mash down that big red button and take all the drama out of it.
What this narrator has going for him is that he is at least self-reflective, he is at least self-aware; he knows his life has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, all of which is made clear in the chorus. I’ve often wondered myself, “Why do I do the things I do / Was I born this way or am I a self-made fool?” And I get angry when I do stupid things and don’t know why. “I shoot the lights and I curse the dark.” I used to push people away if they got too close because real-world person-to-person vulnerability is hard. “I need your love but I’ll break your heart.” And even though many might describe me as a soft-hearted teddy bear, I can tell you that on the inside I feel like life—working in tandem with my own disposition toward the aforementioned self-destruction—has chiseled me into a bit of an asshole. “I had to work to be the jerk I’ve come to be.” So I just want you to know, no matter what it looks like from the outside, none of this is a piece of cake. “It ain’t easy being me.”
Okay, I’m saying some of this slightly tongue-in-cheek, and Knight to some degree is singing it that way. I like to think I’ve worked through a lot of this stuff, but fragments will always hang around in one form or another. And I’m glad that songs are immortal, that this one will always be around, because what it’s really saying is it ain’t easy being this bad at life sometimes—or at least feeling like you are. Anyone can relate to that. And the best thing you can do is have sense of humor about it.
That’s what sets Knight apart: he is honest, perceptive, funny (usually darkly, of course), and he can drop a handful of songs about murder, death, and life not going according to plan into a setlist and somehow make people feel more alive and a little bit better about the world, at least for a couple hours. With a career spanning seven albums (plus two acoustic collections called The Trailer Tapes) over 26 years, there is an embarrassment of riches to explore throughout his discography. There’s “Little Victories,” the John Prine duet about having it pretty good because you have just enough to get by; there’s “Hard Edges,” the grew-up-hard story of tender-hearted, brick-skinned Lisa; the personal “Crooked Road,” a heartrending tale of tragedy in a Logan, West Virginia coal mine; the driving country stomp of “The Lord’s Highway” about a reformed criminal living on the fresh high of the narrow road; and the dream-chasing prodigal story of “Bring the Harvest Home,” whose narrator is ready to return home and reap love. You get the idea.
The week I started writing this retrospective, I saw Knight perform at The Burl and had been listening to him more than usual in the weeks before the show. My now three year old son had started recognizing his voice when it came over the speakers. I’d ask him, “Gus, who’s this singing?” 90% of the time he’d respond with, “Cwis Knight!” and I’d smile as my heart burst with pride, even though the other 10% of the time he’d respond with “Mr. Rogers!” I’m doing what I can to help my son appreciate the good stuff early on, trying to teach him that Kentucky, the state where he was born and will likely grow up, is seeded in talent that’s popping up in every generation, from Slaughters all the way to Salyersville. Of course, he doesn’t understand any of that now. But he will.
At some point I’ll also teach him that the men’s restroom is not a place for conversation. Unless, that is, a legend just happens to be standing at the urinal next to you.
Read the first two entries here:
Part One — Kentucky’s Unsung Songwriter: A Chris Knight Retrospective, Part 1
Part Two — Riding Hard Luck: A Chris Knight Retrospective, Part 2