“It’d been snowing all day when I got home/The fire was out, the cabin was cold/I poured some stale coffee from the pot/The longer I waited, the snow got higher/Had to split some wood and build a fire/If she told me she’d be gone, I forgot.” So starts the haunting song “North Dakota,” one of the high points on Chris Knight’s new release A Pretty Good Guy, which is much more than a pretty good record. The WKU alumnus from Slaughters, Kentucky has made a stellar second album with writing that cuts to the quick, using images that are familiar to paint common man portraits with depth and impact. This reporter once saw someone on the web call him “a rural Bruce Springsteen” and that isn’t far off from the truth.

On A Pretty Good Guy, Knight turns his gritty voice and his pen toward life less sheltered, inhabiting the visceral region where trouble is no stranger and aspirations are modest. Country music used to draw heavily from this before the “Nashville sound” gentrified things; Knight roams all around this ground, not trying to squeeze into an ill-fitting hitmaker’s hole. “I’m not bullshitting anybody with this record,” Knight says on his website.

This reporter only heard what was released to radio of Knight’s self-titled 1998 debut on Decca. One of those songs, “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Me,” was covered last year by John Anderson and released as a single. That first album was well received by critics, but Knight shared the fate of many Decca artists like Danni Leigh when Universal bought parent label MCA. Lee Ann Womack was moved to MCA; Knight and nearly everyone else at Decca lost their contracts. Three years later, Knight is now on Dualtone, the same indie label where David Ball is having success.

A Pretty Good Guy was produced by Dan Baird, former lead singer of the Georgia Satellites. He also did electric and acoustic guitars and backing vocals. Rusty Young of Poco and the Sky Kings put down lap steel and banjo tracks. The instrumentation — primarily acoustic guitars, with judicious use of accordion, overdriven electric guitar, violin, fiddle, and viola — sets the stage for Knight’s hard-edged yet good-natured vocals and his songs of simple pleasures, common vices, and human-sized dramas. Knight wrote all the tracks, with a couple of songs co-written with fellow Americana singer Fred Eaglesmith, two more with David Leone, and one with Sam and Annie Tate.

One might not notice right away just what Knight has got going on lyrically, focusing instead on his vaguely Steve Earle sound. He can capture the essence of small town hanging out, as he does in the fun “Oil Patch Town” where a group of young bucks “Ain’t lookin’ for trouble/But wouldn’t mind a fight/What else you gonna do/It’s just another Friday night.” Then Knight turns around with “Send a Boat” and tugs with a deceptively deft hand at the parts of us that sometimes feel lost and desperate: “Pictures on a wall, a Bible in her hand/Her children never call, she misses her old man/Rain on a window, quiet as a tear/And if you never felt ‘em, you’d never know they’re here.”

The title track lopes as easily as the subject who accepts himself for who and what he is: “I’m certified in CPR/And if you ask me to, I’ll fix your car/It’s just the way I am, got a pretty good life/I’m a pretty good guy.” “Hard Candy” is a love song for a woman whose “hair was as black as Pike County coal [and] lips were as red as blood on the snow” and who was a hardscrabble bootlegger’s daughter.

Two tracks stop the show with their highly evocative sense of drama. “North Dakota” tells of a man whose woman is missing during a blizzard; he searches the homestead as much as he can while wondering if she left him without warning or froze to death in the snow. “Down the River” is the novella among all the stories, a chilling tale of murder set on a river where the singer’s brother, who had just had a fight with someone “you don’t mess with … unless you want a war” is picked out of the boat by a sniper. As viola and violin help set the backdrop, Knight weaves a tale of anguish, danger, and personal vows that moves to a tragic conclusion, though not the one you may expect.

Several songs deal with being on the wrong side of the law. “Becky’s Bible” starts the album with a man running to the swamp in his pickup after a card game fight ended in gunshots: “I wonder if Becky’s Bible is still in the glove box/Cause I’m sure gonna need it if that boy dies.” In “Blame Me,” a man tells his wife Mary to “sit down” while he tells authorities that he robbed a liquor store. By the end, though, the song twists wickedly and shows an altogether different reason why he pleads to “Blame me if crime’s been done/If they need a reason, I’m the one.”

“If I Were You” illustrates the things most people take for granted by way of an encounter between a pedestrian and a homeless man: “If I were you/I wouldn’t be out on these streets the whole night through/Yeah, I’d have a job/And a pretty wife that I could come home to/But I don’t/And I have twenty cents left to my name/And you’re the only one left here that I have to blame.” Using just one acoustic guitar, Knight turns one of the album’s shortest tracks into one of its most memorable.

Anyone who appreciates Americana in general, Pat Haney or John Prine in specific, or wants an antidote to whatever slick genre they’re stuck with on the radio would be well advised to pick up A Pretty Good Guy. Chris Knight is a superlative songwriter and communicator of the world of Dickies and beat up boots, and this reporter is already looking forward to the next release whenever it may come. A Pretty Good Guy is in record stores and online music sites everywhere. For more information, visit Chris Knight’s website at www.chrisknight.net or www.dualtone.com for the label’s site.

Don Thomason is a writer and musician living in Dunbar. Visit him at www.myspace.com/donthomasonmusic