Beautiful Distractions

Knight and Guild is the alias of Michigan native and singer-songwriter Brian Koenigsknecht (Pillar to Post, Sad Ballad, AM Static). His moniker, Knight and Guild, derives from the German translation of his last name, meaning King's Knight, while Guild represents the association of musicians and instrument Brian performs and records his original songs with. With more than twenty years of songwriting and performing experience behind him, Knight and Guild is moving forward into a new chapter of his music with his fourth CD Beautiful Distractions. Each track on the album was a labor of love beginning as long as 7 years ago in the early stages of writing, singing, rewriting to most recently recording, editing and mastering. Lyrically, Beautiful Distractions' theme embraces the vivid reality of both love and life with a humanistic world view. In producing the album, Brian's priority was that the lyrics would be paramount over the music. Why isn't our life, life enough? and Could we agree we've never seen the earth this black and blue? are just some of the questions the album asks the listener to think about. The music for the album was all composed and created by Brian accept for a few special guest vocalists including The Corn Fed Girls guitarist Phil Barry, who also played lap steel guitar. Micaela Kingslight and Kaitlin Rose also lent their voices to tracks on Beautiful Distractions. The vehicle for Knight and Guild's lyrics is a sound merging guitars, piano, strings and vocals that recall influences of Josh Ritter, Ray LaMontagne, M. Ward, and David Gray.