Back in 2007 I was living in Oxford Mississippi and our options for buying music was very limited. I could drive an hour or so to Memphis where there were some good shops. Or I could drive 45 minutes in a different direction to the Best Buy in Tupelo. Or I could drive 3 miles to Wal-Mart and hope that I could find a CD that spoke to me. Needless to say, none of these options were very exciting and there was always a high likelihood that wherever I went wouldn’t have what I was looking for. So sometimes I would take a shot in the dark and try something I had not heard before.

Do you remember those days? The days where we music fans couldn’t hear everything we could ever dream up at the touch of a button. The nostalgia is real but there is also value in blindly exploring, or almost blindly exploring. Mystery has always been a part of music and with streaming and social media a giant chunk of the mystery is gone. There is a big part of me that misses that mystery and sometimes I wait until an album is released and on my turntable before listening to any of it. It is my little revolution against technology.

So now we go back to 2007 in Mississippi. One evening I decided I wanted so Kris Kristofferson on CD so I headed over to the Wal-Mart and hoped for the best. If I am telling the truth I am not sure if I found a Kristofferson CD that evening, it is possible that is when I picked up the two CD Essential Collection. But as I was flipping through the racks in the K section I passed by a CD for Chris Knight’s The Trailer Tapes. Not long before then I had read a review of that album in Paste Magazine. I don’t remember anything about the review and I am sure that after reading it I didn’t say I needed to go out and find that one.

But there it was in front of my face. I was on the hunt for some new music in a place with limited options and here was my opportunity to take a chance and explore something unknown. I bought Chris Knight’s The Trailer Tapes that evening and by the next morning I had become a giant fan. I listened to that CD in my truck over and over again. If you aren’t familiar with Chris Knight I compare him a lot to Steve Earle if Steve wasn’t political. It wasn’t long before I tracked down several more Chris Knight CDs and fell in love with his gritty, well-written songs.

Chris has put out a bunch of albums at this point but most of them were never released on vinyl. Last year or the year before he released A Pretty Good Guy on vinyl for the first time and then a couple of week’s ago The Jealous Kind appeared in the store.

If you are a fan of folks like Turnpike Troubadours, Colter Wall, Townes Van Zandt or Jason Isbell you should give Chris Knight a try. Maybe you should put it on your turntable without hearing a single song and letting the mystery unfold.

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