Thirty Tigers
2007
The Trailer Tapes
About This Album
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.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8)

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