Jennifer Knapp

When pressed about the “we,” she told POLLSTAR she meant her “camp.” Then she thought about it. “Well, just me, I guess, and the mouse in my pocket.”

Sometimes “we” included her manager, Steve Thomas. Sometimes it was her band, which plays with her on select dates.

Knapp is a singer. She’s a 26-year-old “chick with a guitar,” as she put it, and her voice and songwriting have given her a healthy fan base in the U.S. and four dates on last year’s Lilith Fair tour. That makes sense; her voice is Lilith Fair. It has Indigo Girl Amy Ray’s unfiltered- Camel growl, Jewel’s lilt and Sarah McLachlan’s breathy midrange, depending on the song or even the lyric.

“Lilith Fair was great. As an artist, to have them make us an invitation to come and to be one of the artful women influencing our culture of the time, was just a huge compliment to me.”

There’s something else Knapp is a Christian singer.

“I think [Lilith] really helped us as far as buffing down the stereotype a little bit of Christian music that we’re just a bunch of namby-pambies that are weak and untalented, and that’s not true.”

Like many markets, Christian music has stars that may not catch the attention of the mainstream. However, insiders know that Knapp’s first album, kansas, spent 80 weeks on the Top 25 Christian charts. She is the recipient of a Billboard video award and is the 1999 Dove Award winner for new artist and rock song of the year. A recent tour with dc Talk averaged 7,000 fans and her “camp” claims 350,000 followers total.

It’s no surprise she mentions Sixpence None The Richer and its guitarist, Matt Slocum, who arranged the strings for kansas, as heroes. Knapp has the talent, business savvy and work ethic to follow Sixpence into the mainstream. And, as she said, the music warrants itself to being played outside the church walls.

“We’re pushing general market stuff. We’re trying to get more CDs on the shelves at Best Buy or Target or whatever, and not just be found in an environment that only Christians know about. No offense to that, but there are other people who enjoy the music that we have, and I take that very seriously.”

Her sophomore album, lay it down, on Gotee Records is filled with songs about faith. But like many of today’s Christian superstars, from Sixpence to P.O.D., her message comes across like a conversation two tables away. It is Christian music, but, hey, it’s music.

In 1992, as a music major at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, Knapp tuned out her partying lifestyle and joined a group of Christian friends. On scholarship as a trumpet player, Knapp did not sing or play guitar. She started strumming an acoustic, her hands shaking, at a weekly worship group, and her friends encouraged her to continue singing.

“On breaks, I would be playing in some backwater Southern Baptist church in the Ozarks somewhere with four or five blue-haired ladies wondering why I’m banging on my guitar and cutting it in half,” Knapp said, “but they were just grateful that I was singing about God. … Now, it’s evolved into something that’s really passionate to me.”

While at school, she put together a five-song demo tape, which got her gigs and helped pay for meals. Eventually, through word-of-mouth, she was contacted by Toby McKeehan of dc Talk, who was also CEO of Gotee.

Two successful albums, several awards and a thousand performances later, “Jennifer Knapp is more like a commodity than it is my real, personal name 80 percent of the day.”

And the other 20 percent belongs to?

“The IRS.”

She usually plays 300 gigs a year, although she has relaxed this year to 120, many with the band.

“[Solo acoustic] is definitely kind of a storyteller’s intimate conversation vibe that I wouldn’t change. But sometimes I just want to go out and flex my muscles. I wanna go out and be a rock ‘n’ roll chick and just slam dunk some of this music, and I can’t always do that by myself.”

Knapp said that she has never worried about being onstage, only being onstage and stinking. That’s what motivated her to play guitar. Now that she’s successful in the U.S., and ready to take on Europe and Australia, she thinks about where she is and what motivates her to keep going.

“You rarely see a person get a second chance, and it’s a quick burn. Either you make a long burn of it or you make a quick burn of it, and I don’t know which one we’re going to have. It’s a short-burst kind of environment that we live in.”