"There ought to be a town somewhere / Named for how I feel / Yeah, I could be the Mayor down there / And say welcome to Sorryville." These lines from "It Ain't Easy Being Me," the words of a narrator who cannot stop his self-destructive behavior, open Chris Knight's self-titled debut album and invite the listener to Sorryville, a place where isolation is the only given. Chris Knight tells the stories of those living in Sorryville and their struggles with loneliness: Some fight it, though they have little hope; others manage to find happiness or at least arrive at an uneasy compromise; and there are those who are destroyed, either by others or by themselves.

Knight, a 37-year-old former surface-mining inspector from Slaughters, Kentucky, is one of the most exciting new singer/songwriters in country music. Knight's lyrics are minimalist yet rhetorically complex, using narratives and first-person accounts that reflect two of his primary influences, John Prine and Steve Earle. (Knight is the primary writer though some songs have co-authors.) Chris Knight is tied to the larger Southern tradition with its emphasis on family and the land, a point reinforced not only by the songs but also by Knight's voice, an isolated Kentucky drawl that tells stories of unflinching honesty.

Knight re-examines this tradition by placing characters with old values in a radically modern world-a point highlighted in the contrast between Knight's voice and the modern sound of the music, with its drums and electric guitars. Knight has said of the album: "I like everything really bare bones. We could have made a real acoustic, stark-sounding album, but I wanted those songs to sound as big as they could, as big as it made sense for the songs because that's what the people in them deserved." The compromise is consistent with between the vision holding the album together: Isolation, from lovers, from family, from the land, is inevitable; it is only the characters' responses that vary.

For example, "Framed" is the account of a truck driver who says he was wrongly found guilty of killing a man. Finally, in the song's closing lines, the narrator reveals that he did, in fact, shoot the man for having an affair with his wife; he then quickly returns to the refrain, "I was framed." Knight's narrator is so self-involved that he believes the lovers, knowing how he'd react, conspired to frame him-even though this results in one of their deaths. "Love and a .45" tells of a cop and prostitute brought together through violence and desperation, while "House and 90 Acres" describes a farmer, deserted by his wife, left with children, and faced with the foreclosure of his farm; there is a sense the narrator will kill himself before willingly leaving. In "Bring the Harvest Home" and "The Summer of '75," characters manage to find love, but in the larger context of Knight's vision, it is unclear whether such consolation can last. Closing the album is "William," the story-told acoustically-of the speaker's childhood friend, the product of poverty and abuse. Ultimately, an adult William is killed while robbing a store; the storyteller knows that William's fate had long been sealed and that he could have been William.

Knight's commercial fate remains to be seen. He is not the kind of product Nashville likes to sell, for he lacks the charisma of Garth, the "authenticity" of George Strait, the sexuality of Tim McGraw. Instead, Knight's emphasis is on the music, not the show.

But the world of commercial politics seem far removed from the characters inhabiting Sorryville, and Chris Knight is a devastating album for the way in which it tells their stories. It is in hearing these stories that we meet others and, perhaps, see ourselves.