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Local rocker Kit Rodgers rediscovers his solo acoustic roots

By Steve Wildsmith stevew@thedailytimes.com

Aug 30, 2017

To paraphrase Bob Seger, singer-songwriter Kit Rodgers still likes that old-time rock ‘n’ roll, but the feeling’s not exactly mutual.

He’s been a part of the East Tennessee music scene for several decades now, but tearing up the stage at Preservation Pub in downtown Knoxville as part of the rock bands Brimstone Treehouse or Model Inmates takes its toll, he told The Daily Times this week.

“We’ll probably play another show, but it wears us out, because we’re not young chickens anymore!” he said. “To play an hour and a half of stuff where there aren’t any slow songs — that’s a lot of jumping around and sweating that I don’t know if I can do anymore.”

Fortunately, Rodgers is an equal-opportunity musician, just as comfortable with an acoustic guitar or behind a piano, crooning gentle ballads or telling story songs as he is peeling off power chords with a Pete Townshend cartwheel. That makes an opportunity to play a listening room like Vienna Coffeehouse, where he’ll perform on Friday, a refreshing change of pace for Rodgers, a Louisiana native who moved to Atlanta when he was 18.

At the time, he joined a band before working his way into the singer-songwriter circuit via the well-known club Eddie’s Attic in nearby Decatur, Ga. At the time, artists like John Mayer, Shawn Mullins and Jennifer Nettles were part of his circle of peers. After moving to Knoxville, he went back to school and took a break from music before joining Vanessa Draper and Karen E. Reynolds in the much-loved local folk trio, Draper, Reynolds and Rodgers.

He got Brimstone Treehouse off the ground roughly seven years ago and was getting back into playing rock ‘n’ roll again when his old friend and drummer, Dustin West, died.

“We just couldn’t bring ourselves to play that stuff anymore,” Rodgers said. “Several months after he died, I decided I wanted to do a rock band that didn’t play any of the old stuff, so we started a three-piece with a driving ’90s rock kind of sound and called ourselves Model Inmates. That was really fun, and I don’t know if it was my age or what, but I just wanted to get back to just being alone on stage.”

In refocusing on a solo career, he realized he had 25 years worth of material that was gathering dust.

“I like some of this old stuff I wrote; I just didn’t have an opportunity to play it before now,” he said. “It’s liberating, because I’m genre-free when I’m by myself. I can play a country song or a pop song or a rock song — whatever comes out of me. I’m kind of looking forward to it.”

Right now, Rodgers plans on recording a live solo piano album, and Friday at Vienna, he’ll switch between piano and guitar.

“I’m trying to get back to paying attention to the music and vocals,” he said. “I want to play settings that are a little more intimate, and even some earlier shows to try and get folks to come out that’ll want to sit and listen.”

It’s hard to pin down Rodgers’ sound, mostly because he’s not beholden to any particular genre, and he’s never listened to a lot of music outside of the CDs he’s swapped with other musicians he’s met along the way. There’s a sweet familiarity to his acoustic songs, a longing for home and hearth that’s almost prescient, he added.

“Sometimes I’ll listen to things I wrote when I was 19 or 20 years old, and it has as much meaning to me now as it did then,” he said. “I’m not necessarily looking back at what I was thinking at the time; it’s more of strange, prophetic deal of, ‘Look what I turned into.’ The only solo albums I put out were around the time I met my wife and she was pregnant with our first child, so there’s a lot of things I’m writing about myself and my little family. Twenty years later, those things still hold true, and it seems like every time I listen back to some of them, there’s something that strikes me that’s relevant right now.”

Steve Wildsmith is the Weekend editor for The Daily Times. Contact him at stevew@thedailytimes.com or at 981-1144, follow him on Twitter @TNRockWriter and “Like” Weekend on Facebook at www.facebook.com/dailytimesweekend.