May your hope always outweigh
your doubt
Till this old world finally
punches you out…
— Todd Snider, “Like a Force of Nature”
It’s midnight on Saturday in my little shack, rain tapping on the roof. Just the dog and me and the music of the late Todd Snider. The barefoot bard of East Nashville is gone and I’ll admit it, I’m crying. It feels like I lost a friend.
I never met Todd Snider, never even saw him play. But he’s been keeping me company on rainy nights and foggy mornings and sunshiny afternoons for a long time now. Time that slipped away much too quickly, as Todd always knew that it would:
Seems like day after day
goes by like nothing
is ever going to change
Then just like overnight it’s like
it ain’t never gonna be the same…
(“Just Like Overnight”, 2019)
One day, the funniest, sharpest-witted troubadour in the universe has a new album and is about to launch a tour. Then you turn around to find that he’s dead at 59. I heard the news a few hours ago from my buddy Fisher.
Now I can’t stop listening to the stoner storyteller who helped invent the genre called Americana (what Snider liked to call “unsuccessful country music”).
It was Fisher who introduced me to Todd Snider’s music in 2013. For weeks, I’d been whimpering over the crash-and-burn of yet another tragicomic romance. As my go-to mental health consultant, he had about run out of treatment options.
But Fisher knew I loved anything to do with trains, and that I needed to laugh. He knew that being excessive and irresponsible and incorrigibly free was my M.O. So he sent me a link to a live version of “Play a Train Song.”
It’s the perfect entree into the World of Todd: a posthumous tribute to one of Snider’s good-timing Nashville music pals, Skip Litz, who always kept a stash in his pocket and liked to park his Caddy on the sidewalk at the end of a long night.
In the set-up, Snider recalls that Litz always said he “wanted to die peacefully in his sleep like his grandfather … and not screamin’ and cryin’ like everybody else in the car.”
That was Todd on stage–a master at loosening up his audience before slaying them with diamond lyrics that could make you laugh, cry and think hard, all at once. The song’s last verse ends this way:
And though I tried with all
of my sadness
I just could not weep
for a man who looked to me like
he died laughing in his sleep
Singing a train song…
Todd Snider was all about laughter, even when it was mixed up with tears.
Soon I was listening to all of his stuff that I could get my ears on, starting with “East Nashville Skyline,” the 2004 release that’s considered one of his best, a landmark in alt-country music.
The songs in “ENS” touch on everything from life on the road to waking up in jail, from Hank Williams to Janis Joplin to Mike Tyson, from bullying to teen suicide (and to teen resurrection). Most of the songs are funny, and every one gleams with insight, compassion, and the firm conviction that this wild ride we’re all on is something extraordinary to behold.
From there I graduated to Snider’s live albums, starting with “Near Truths and Hotel Rooms” (2003) a solo acoustic record that catches the magic Snider routinely worked on stage for three decades. Cuts like “Statistician’s Blues” and “I Can’t Complain” pump out humor like laughing gas. When he sings about the dark side, he cuts to the marrow.
Like the masters he idolized and eventually shared the stage with–John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark–Snider lived the party life. His troubles with booze, drugs and the law gave him some of his best songs. (They even helped him find a wife–during a stint in rehab in the late Nineties.)
In “Long Year” he walks into a 12-Step room, sits alone in the back and asks the question that needs no answer: “How did I get here?” By the last verse he’s back with his bar buddies, glass in hand: “So I threw one down and said/thanks a lot/as I said to myself/well, here we go again…”
Two other live albums (both doubles) are out there. On “The Storyteller” (2011) Snider is backed up by killer musicians; “Live: Return of the Storyteller” (2022) is drawn from solo acoustic concerts. Each is a rollicking winner, showcasing Snider’s trademarks: the absurdist yarn-spinning, the self-deprecating humor, his uncanny skill at connecting with an audience.
Of the twenty or so records Snider made, only the last one “High, Lonesome and then Some” is a difficult listen. Released just weeks before his death, it’s a bleak survey of life with the fun drained out of it.
The musical heroes who had become Snider’s best friends–Prine, Walker, Clark, Kris Kristofferson and Billy Joe Shaver–had all died. He was mired in opiates and suffered debilitating back pain. His beloved traveling life was nearly impossible. “It’s all heartache,” he told Rolling Stone in October.
Still, he launched one last tour and made the first date, in Denver. The rest of the shows were cancelled after Snider was apparently mugged, then hospitalized, then arrested in Salt Lake City. He went home to Tennessee and, according to his publicists, died of pneumonia ten days later.
And now the dog sleeps, the rain keeps falling, and I stare out at the night and listen to a train song.
