"McKnight a musical rebel with more than one cause"

Scott McLennan, Worcester (MA) Telegram & Gazette

Singer and songwriter Andrew McKnight is not one to complain. Or at least just complain.

Aware of how easy it is to be tagged as an “angsty white guy,” McKnight not only raises issues that rattle a community, but also likes to aid the things that strengthen a community.

Near his Virginia home, for example, McKnight has lent his talents to the Sierra Club and efforts to preserve Chesapeake Bay. And when his spate of concerts in the Northeast brings McKnight to Worcester on Sunday, he will play for the benefit of community radio station WCUW-FM (91.3).

“I’ve been on the air at WCUW, and the diversity of its programming is something the suits that run mainstream radio simply can’t process. But for a community that has so many voices, a radio station like that gives different people a chance to be heard. And the people listening may discover something they may otherwise have never heard,” McKnight said when reached by phone recently.

McKnight’s actions seem in line with the title of his most recent record, “Something Worth Standing For.”

McKnight is performing at 3 p.m. Sunday at Café Fantastique located inside Rotmans furniture store 725 Southbridge St., Worcester. Admission is $10 with a portion of the proceeds going to WCUW.

“Something Worth Standing For” is a record that sounds like it could have been programmed by the ’CUW staff, as McKnight spread 16 diverse tracks across the album’s hourlong playing time. Haunting blues, feisty anthems, rustic folk, and a bit of swing make it onto McKnight’s soundscape.

“When you put out records every three years, you want to make sure you give people their money’s worth,” he jokingly said about stuffing so many ideas into an album.

But more seriously, McKnight, who began his music career 15 years ago and has put out five CDs and established a national touring regimen, said he would rather look at his albums as collections of songs that belong together — a “tapestry” he called it — than devise something more suitably homogenous for standard marketability.

There were some problems, though, with getting “Something Worth Standing For” off of the ground.

“I was having trouble writing. Everything either sounded angry or trite. I lead a blessed life. Where was this anger coming from?” McKnight explained, telling how he was happy with where his family had settled and how he and his wife had welcomed a baby daughter into their lives.

But in the years since his previous album, events such as Hurricane Katrina and the shootings at Virginia Tech transpired, and the effects of the Iraq war seeped more deeply into the culture.

“I realized you can’t just avoid the outside world,” McKnight said.

But rather than just vent, McKnight leavened his discontent with some hope, especially when focusing on characters that overcame adversity or found some sort of justice in their lives.

McKnight interestingly set his original songs inspired by the struggle of immigrants or the events unleashed by Katrina alongside some traditional pieces such as the Carter Family signature “Worried Man Blues” and an adaptation of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads Blues.”

“As I brought together my material with the band, I found I also loved these songs from other difficult times,” McKnight said. “These were songs I found solidarity with. The specifics may be different from my songs, but emotionally they are similar.”

And like those songs that stood the test of time, McKnight resisted indictment, preferring introspection. For instance, he has one song imagining what George Washington would think of the current state of the country he helped found, and another pondering how photographer Ansel Adams could find the beauty of his surroundings in a way that cut through whatever clutter blew around the country.

“I tried to transcend polarized viewpoints,” McKnight said. “I wanted these songs to recognize the common ground we share.”

Scott McLennan can be reached at tgmusic1@yahoo.com.