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"Three alumni find their life's work in music"
Amy Rogers Nazarov, Connecticut College Alumni Magazine
Driving home to Virginia´s Shenandoah Valley from a gig in Asheville, N.C., Andrew McKnight ´89 found himself contemplating the links between his major at Connecticut College and his compulsion to write songs about the Earth.
“I didn´t major in chemistry to become a chemist,” McKnight says. “I knew I wanted to be an environmental engineer and saw chemistry as a springboard to that.”
While working at an environmental consulting engineering firm, McKnight began building a following, one listener at a time, for his Appalachian-flavored folk. Affecting listeners with his songs — about love, fatherhood, the future of the planet — proved to be so satisfying that McKnight decided to make a go of a full-time music career in 1996.
Organizations like the Charlotte Folk Society praise his “ability to mix history, traditional themes and environmental concerns in an evocative, rootsy musical blend.”
McKnight is speaking out — or singing out — against mountaintop removal coal mining, in part through “Made by Hand,” written by McKnight and band mate Les Thompson, a founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The song is featured on “Still Moving Mountains: The Journey Home,” a compilation CD released this year to publicize the devastating environmental effects of mountaintop removal.
McKnight, who released his latest CD, "Something Worth Standing For,” in 2008, relishes an intimate house concert performing for two dozen attentive listeners as much as a standing-room-only gig before hundreds at the Kennedy Center´s Millennium Stage.
“I am a pretty lucky guy who writes songs about the crazy times we live in,” he says.
