Just read Grant Alden’s essay nominally on country songwriter Chris Knight.
I have to say—and this is not me kissing up to a former-and-maybe-future editor—Grant, though his NoDepression.com title “curmudgeon emeritus” is no joke, takes my breath away with this. I don’t know how he gets away with telling this story and not falling into pure schmaltz. He does, though, I think.
The essay starts:
This is all about Chris Knight and why you should listen to his new album, the one called Heart Of Stone, and why it may be the best album he’s ever made even if nobody much cares at this point. But it’s a long story, and it digresses some.
It begins here: After sixteen months in Los Angeles, I flew to Nashville blind and rented an apartment in Tusculum, at the edge of town, from an old man named Guy P. He had lost his wife to cancer, and so he looked for people to talk to, but he warned me that he heard poorly and I should take care not to creep up behind him because he’d think I was Charley, and he might kill me. He was a big man, a powerful man, even in his 70s.
Not incidentally Grant expresses something of the heartbreak I’ve felt over many intense songwriters—that “even if nobody much cares at this point” perfectly Eeyoreish throwaway-on-purpose clause, and:
… there was this song: “If I Were You”, a sharply written morality play, a short story in song form, a gut-wrenching bit of unflinching social commentary. It was and is an amazing piece of work.
If not a blessing, for it is not entirely clear that Chris Knight has written or will write another song that good. Or, maybe, having heard that, we now expect it of him and are less receptive to anything else, and can no longer be surprised by the eloquent bleakness of his vision.
Though I do think you can stop when he starts to critique Knight’s new album. … perhaps nobody much cares at this point? More like I stopped listening to Mary Gauthier, for one, because the high-profile album didn’t match up to the earlier albums, and I couldn’t imagine she could ever knock me down again.
xox
djd
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