If a downtown building has a piano open to the public, Daniel Knox has probably played it. The Chicago singer-songwriter is a night owl, drawn to in-between places and in-­between times. When he’s not at work, asleep, or in the office where he has his recording studio, he’s wandering around the city, often in the wee hours. It was in downtown hotels in the late 90s, when he was about to drop out of the film program at Columbia, that he taught himself how to play music. “The Drake, the Westin,” he says. “The Art Institute has a piano. And in the back Board of Trade room.”

Knox’s face is on the cover of his self-titled third album, in fact, but rather than a photo he used a painting by Chicago artist Gregory Jacobsen. Daniel Knox, which comes out Tuesday on Carrot Top, seems poised to be his breakout record. It’s the first to capture what makes his performances so arresting: his powerful presence, the oaken grain of his voice, the poignance and nuance in his music.

Disaster and Evryman form the first two parts of a trilogy (the third, also recorded at Electrical, may see release late this year), but Daniel Knox feels more unified by story. The songs progress into each other naturally, and the album is tied together by thematic threads. Knox frequently mentions once-­thriving local businesses (Venture, White Hen) and specific locations (“Lawrence & MacArthur,” “High Pointe Drive”). His narrators and characters also display a self-aware strain of cruelty: in “By the Venture” someone’s house “looks like garbage,” and the speaker in “Don’t Touch Me” tells an anonymous person not to touch him “with dirty hands.” (Knox’s attitude on the subject is pragmatic: “Sometimes you just have to let yourself have those little moments of cruelty and go ahead and feel good about it, ’cause there’s not a whole lot of things where you’re allowed to.”)

“I went down there, and I was in a parking lot at the AMC movie theater, and it was beautiful. It was the place where I lost my virginity—there used to be an old drive-in movie screen. And I thought, ‘Oh, how sad! It’s gone.’ Now it’s just this big, beautiful open space with all those creepy little islands that exist for no reason with a patch of grass, light poles sticking out of it. It’s just as beautiful as it was then, just in a different kind of way.”

Knox dropped out in 1999 and found work at Ross Wetzel Framing Company, which he quit after being denied workers’ comp for an accident on the job. “I cut a piece of my finger mostly off,” he says. “And they were like, ‘You don’t need that little piece.’” He did temp work and briefly waited tables at a restaurant down the street from the Music Box called Mamacita’s.

Lynch ate ravioli and spoke with Knox about Inland Empire. As Knox remembers it, “He said, ‘I made it with people I know, in my neighborhood, with a consumer-grade video camera.’ And it was just like all the things that I had done.”

Sat 2/28, 7:30 PM and 9:30 PM Constellation Both shows sold out No opener on early show 18+