Chris Knight - "Heart of Stone"

This is album number six for Slaughters, Kentucky native Chris Knight, and he does what he’s done the previous five times out: write and sing like a young Steve Earle before Steve left the narratives of small town scrappers and losers behind him to take up the larger concerns of the big city and big-city politics.

Chris Knight doesn’t care much for big cities or politics. His hometown, pop. 200, is all that’s left of what was once a thriving coal mining community. The coal is long gone, there aren’t any jobs, and now Jethro and Ellie Mae are liable to be cooking up a batch of meth out on the bucolic Back 40. The rootsy twang that dominates most of these songs will call to mind Ryan Adams in alt.country mode, but the songwriting is sharp, detailed, and acerbic, and if you’ve heard this music a thousand times, and you have, you haven’t met these characters before. Best of all is the devastating “Crooked Road,” the tale of a man who has lost his son to the mines and his wife to sorrow, and who now travels the circuitous mountain highways, trying to get somewhere, anywhere, all the while cursing everything in sight: ...Andy Whitman