Chris Knight w/Eli Gardiner at the Turf Club

After 23 years as a recording artist, singer-songwriter Chris Knight remains boldly empowered to make music that always delivers the unflinching truth. In fact, the man raised in Slaughters, Kentucky uses a simple, direct barometer to regularly check his muse: “If I can’t believe myself, I won’t sing the song.”

That brutally honest, no-frills philosophy fits his Americana-fueled, backwoods-grown merger of folk, country, and rock. It’s been at the backbone of nine studio albums, beginning with 1998’s acclaimed self-titled debut and traveling through scorchers such as the one-two punch of 2001’s A Pretty Good Guy and 2003’s The Jealous Kind, two demo-styled discs (2007’s The Trailer Tapes and 2009’s Trailer II), and the recent, electric guitar-fortified opus, 2019’s Almost Daylight.

Eli Gardiner’s music is steeped in the singer songwriter tradition. Growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on a healthy dose of Springsteen, Croce, Taylor, Young, and Dylan, he learned about the art of songwriting early on. “Some of my first musical memories are listening to Saturday Night Gold on the radio with my family, hearing the oldies, songs like 'Runaway' by Del Shannon.” Eli states. Both his parents were musicians. His mother played flute and his father classical guitar. Eli has been writing songs since he was in high school.