The words coming through the phone are bleak, but they don’t really sound that way when he says them: “I think something is over.”
It’s a couple days before Thanksgiving and the voice on the other end belongs to Todd Snider. Until a series of health setbacks sidelined the self-described “sock you can’t find in the dryer” from the road two years ago, the 58-year-old had spent his entire adult life on stages, on couches, and on tour in pursuit of the song.
He’s done his best to stay active in the interim, releasing pandemic-era, in-studio live recordings of each of his albums for free. The stripped-down, solo “Purple Versions” of his first ten solo LPs—from his 1994 debut Songs For the Daily Planet through 2019’s Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3—are out now as a best-of vinyl box set with a digital EP accompaniment.
But as we speak, it becomes clear that he’s approaching an unfamiliar crossroads: There are no more recordings in the can. There are no shows scheduled. For the first time, Todd Snider is being confronted with the difference between not having plans and not having options, and he’s finding that difference to be drastic. Maybe something really is over.
As Snider says matter-of-factly of his career up until this point. “It was kind of like an experiment… that was born of opportunity. I didn’t have anything to do. I didn’t have anybody watching me. I had seen that movie Where The Buffalo Roam and I was like, ‘I can live like that if I want to because I don’t have anything to live up to or lose.’ And [it] lasted a long time.
“It’s over,” he reiterates. “I just haven’t really left my house, but it used to be if I left my house, I was up for it, whatever it was. That was just a rule. I was out trying to find the song in the chaos of what was going on. If some guy with a nickname told me to get in his car, I guess that’s the best way to put it. And then it leads to a certain madness.”
In an attempt to exemplify that thrilling “madness” he has chased for so long, Snider recounts a winding tale about a chaotic night in Chicago. It involves various relatives of Willie Nelson, a borrowed computer, winding up in some confused guy’s apartment, and being confronted with the fact that his unwitting host had no idea who he was. It’s hard to follow, to be honest. Maybe that’s the point. “I had just lost the plot,” Snider surmised of that night, using a frequent catchphrase.
Snider’s lackadaisical cadence has a way of cooly convincing you that what he’s saying made perfect sense at the time—no matter how scattershot it may be. The stories he tells don’t end resolutely; they slip into reflections or deviations in pursuit of the song within the madness. Why would his own story be any different?
As he moves from his 40-some-odd-year vagabond chapter into whatever happens to be next, “it’s over” sounds less like a lament than an expression of acceptance. “I would’ve rather done that than have become a responsible person,” he says.
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Just Like Old Times
The last time I talked to Todd Snider in the fall of 2023, the folksinging shaman had resurfaced after a few weeks of being M.I.A.—coincidentally just in time to promote the release of his “lost” 2007 album Crank It, We’re Doomed. Around that same time, Snider canceled all his concerts. He has yet to announce any new tours.
A recent surgery for a stomach ailment (something he attributes to a lifetime of pre-show nerves) and an ongoing battle with stenosis have taken him offstage until further notice. According to the National Institute of Health, stenosis is when spaces in the spine narrow and create pressure on the spinal cord and nerve roots. According to Todd, it hurts. A lot.
“My bones, they’re just awful. And they’re not going to get better,” Snider resigns. “I’m kind of in denial about it. It’s hard for me to stand up for very long. It’s a weird disease. If you walk, it’s okay. But just standing there is really hard. … It’s been coming for a while. … It’s like this thing where the holes that your nerves go through are getting smaller, so it’s like ‘Where does it hurt?’ ‘Yep.’ Because they all [hurt], it’s like you’re one nerve and it’s pinched.
“This world’s getting on my nerve,” he chuckles.
Despite the pain, Snider returned to the Mountain Stage in September for a one-off taping with Amy Helm, Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors, and Randall Bramblet. Asked how it went, Todd replies simply, “Well, it hurt, but also it felt like riding a bike.”
As for the possibility of future shows, Snider is cautiously optimistic. “I mean I’m not retired or anything. I’m trying to get to where I feel really confident that I could [play]. … I hope that’s not like a delusion, but I think at the very least I would be able to do my Sunday shows again,” Snider says, referencing his COVID-era livestreams from his Purple Building studio in East Nashville. “If I booked a gig, I’d want to be absolutely sure that I was going to be able to do it and not cancel. And I am in denial about it a little in my mind. I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna go play again.'”
The duality of Snider’s response notwithstanding, he is putting together a new band. The group is being assembled in Texas by Snider’s longtime friend Sterling Finlay, who Todd pointed out is on his second heart—casting more doubt as to whether this will be a viable touring outfit or just the house band for the intensive care unit. The next step toward the stage is going from Nashville to Texas for some rehearsals to see how long he can perform and maintain his composure. Snider has spent the past couple years off the medically prescribed “hard drugs” he needed to withstand the pain of touring and performing. The goal in playing through the pain was to save up enough money so he could take an extended absence from the stage.
“You ever notice that when someone puts out a new record and you read the interview, they’re always in a good place now and they weren’t in a great place before? I’m not in a great place now, but I’m in a place now,” Todd admits, before saying the most Todd Snider thing of the entire interview: “I don’t know if I think there’s a great place or a bad place. I’m just trying to get away from that kind of thinking.”
Todd is in a place—whether he believes it or not—and he also does have a new record out… kind of. The Best of All My Songs vinyl box set features six LPs culled from months of livestreams, distilling the essence of Todd’s troubadour oeuvre into 49 tracks from across his discography. The collection captures the pickin’, grinnin’, story-tellin’ spark of seminal live releases Near Truths and Hotel Rooms, The Storyteller, and 2022 sequel Return of the Storyteller and combines it with a living room intimacy.
“This one that’s coming out [Best of All My Songs] is my favorite stuff I’ve done,” Snider said. “‘Cause I can sit by myself, tell bullshit about why I made up a song, play the song. I feel like I fell out of my mom doing that. And then if you hear my records, it’s always like that mixed with whatever I’m interested in at the time. And now it’s just distilled down to the busker and I feel like that’s what I have to offer.”
“Whatever I’m interested in at the time” has taken on many forms over Snider’s illustrious career. There’s his garage rock alter-ego Elmo Buzz, his foray into “fatback” funk on 2021’s First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder, his jam band side project Hard Working Americans with Widespread Panic’s Dave Schools and the late Neal Casal.
His first few records from the ’90s—Songs for the Daily Planet, Step Right Up, and Viva Satellite—on MCA (and subsidiary Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Records) carry some of that “Nashville sound” that may have been a bit off-putting for those seeking the ramblin’ Todd Snider of his live performances. Beneath the layers of instrumentation and production, however, there was always Snider’s tongue-in-cheek slacker wiseass lyricism—something that was given more space to shine following his move to John Prine’s Oh Boy Records at the turn of the century.
“It didn’t serve me to put that shit in,” Snider said of the way he’s followed various muses through his studio discography. “I mean, I didn’t know anything about music and demanded creative control, and then got into trying to fancy myself as this producer-type person. And [nobody has ever been] like, ‘Wow, can’t wait to hear the new sound!’ … I’m not saying I regret doing [the songs that way]. I wanted to make up songs and then have them sound however I was into things sounding at the time, and I got to do it because I could do it by myself.”
…
New Connection
The varied inspirations Snider has chased through the studio haven’t stopped just because he’s off the road. In addition to planning on doing more livestreams in the new year, Snider wants to start using his Purple Building studio to its full potential. “I’m going to pretend I have a TV station,” he says.
“I’m going to try to get a show together called No Fucking Way,” he goes on. “It’s a reality show where Stacie Huckeba follows [Crocs inventor, eccentric millionaire, and Todd Snider superfan] George Boedecker around with a camera. He’s a phenom. There’s not another Boedecker, man. I’m a connoisseur of people like that. It’s like a free spirit with a hundred million dollars. He’s just looking for good times. … He is the Hunter S. Thompson of holey sandals.”
He’s thinking of other shows, too, including Elizabeth Cook‘s East Nashville Tonight—a reboot of a 2013 behind-the-scenes documentary on East Nashville that starred Todd and, among others, the late Jeff Austin. He also has a Substack, The Snider Files, which he likens to a newspaper, consisting of journalist and longtime friend Daryl Sanders combing through decades of Todd’s notebook scraps, unpublishable interviews, archival clips, and other odds and ends and blasting them out to email subscribers several times a week. Even for the dedicated Shitheads (Todd Snider fans), it’s a lot of material.
As for a new album, the last time we spoke Snider was optimistic about a new “I-guess-what-you’d-call-folk-rock” record with Crank It, We’re Doomed producer Eric McConnell. Unfortunately, due to some lyrical consolidation, nine songs dwindled to five, and then three of them turned into one. As for the purported style, that may not have been the new direction Todd was looking for.
“I thought I had this new way to play country music, but Aaron Lee Tasjan helped me figure it out and I think it was like a hoax,” Snider admits. “It was more like, ‘I think you’re learning to play drums.’ Well, he didn’t say that, but he explained what I was doing in a way that made me think, ‘I’m just learning to play drums,’ so that’s not as exciting as coming up with a new way to play country music.”
One of the songs Snider does have in the can is a collaboration with The Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson. Amid an esoteric conversation on the philosophy of not giving a shit, Snider highlights Robinson and The Crowes as one of the acts still standing that has held onto the rock n’ roll ethos.
“I would say The Black Crowes are still swinging it pretty hard, and the ‘Spread [Panic]. There’s some rock and roll left, but no young people,” Snider observes in a way that manages not to sound condescending to a 27-year-old who has heard that shit from Boomers his entire life. “I still think JB [Widespread Panic’s John Bell] and especially I think Chris is a master at it. I’ve seen [Chris] do it, it’s like a shamanistic thing. I was at the show and he gave me a bunch of, I don’t remember if it was LSD or shrooms, and we both took it and the show started and he started that dance. It’s almost like the way I talk. And then when the show got over, he grabbed me and went on to his dressing room and he just danced for another 20 minutes to Sly and the Family Stone. And it wasn’t fake, either. It was super genuine. You’re just watching this person come out of a trance that they went in for no other reason than to rock out or throw a brick through the school window.”
That isn’t to say Snider has given up on the next generation. Throughout our 77-minute phone call, Snider name-drops a bevy of up-and-comers like Rachel Cole (from his Aimless Records label), Aaron Lee Tasjan (who has been assisting Todd in the studio), Evan Nicole Bell (“Man, just put her name. People: look her up.”), and even L.A. Rams backup quarterback Stetson Bennett and comedian Dusty Slay. Following the death of Snider’s longtime friend Richard Lewis, Slay stepped up to assume the legendary comedian’s role of reminding Todd that he is not a comedian (though his onstage monologues have a Carlin-esque quality).
“It’s a little bit like writing a joke, but it’s not. And it’s a little bit like writing a song, but it’s not,” Snider says of his funny stories. “And so Richard Lewis called and he left one of my stories on my machine, but then I write jokes for him and he’s like, ‘God, you have to stop. You’re the worst joke writer.’ And then after he passed away, I tried to tell Dusty a joke and he was like, ‘You know that Richard [pauses] he was a wise man.'”
While Todd might not be an elder statesman of standup, he has a lot to offer the next generation of songwriters. The man who was once John Prine’s driver is now in a position to pass his wisdom to the stars of tomorrow. For someone who was broken in by Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver, and Jimmy Buffett (see a pattern?), the status is surreal.
“They say pass it on and it just feels like an instinctive duty,” Snider says of his responsibility to the future. “In my mind, I feel like I see what those guys saw, which is [that] it feels like … somebody can’t do anything else. Sierra [Ferrell] struck me that way and [Rachel Cole] struck me that way. And every time somebody would open for me, I had [Jason] Isbell open for me right before Southeastern and I heard those songs. I knew what was about to happen.”
While preparing for this latest interview, I read through my last conversation with Todd. One thing he had said made me wince. While talking about all the people he had lost in recent years—Jeff Austin, Neal Casal, John Prine, etc., etc.—he had noted, “All my mentors, except for Kris [Kristofferson], are gone, and it’s been hard to adjust to.” The Highwayman passed away just weeks ahead of this latest call, and with him went the last of a hallowed generation of songwriters.
“I knew when it happened, something’s totally over,” Snider grieves. “I’ve got this box set coming out and it just feels like something is over. I think what I’m processing is just figuring out what to do now. And I haven’t really come up with anything.”
…
That Was Me
Despite the overtones of finality that have come with this latest chapter, Todd Snider exudes tremendous gratitude and—above all—bewilderment at how his life turned out.
“I can’t believe it turned into a job,” Snider says in subdued amazement. “I have a house, all this. I thought that I would end up… I didn’t know how it would end up. In my day, you didn’t get tattoos on your face, but I was just trying to be a tattoo-face and then just kept that going. … This was almost like an experiment of how long can you go on without any concern for the future. And it was a gas, gas, gas.”
On our last call, and in many other interviews, Snider described his freewheeling condition as “being the sock you can’t find in the dryer.” After he was forced to sit still for the past year and change, I ask him how that lost sock felt now that it had been found and put in the drawer.
“I don’t know if I would say found. Just sitting still, I guess,” Snider surmises. “That dryer is in Beaverton, OR, but that’s a good way to put it. I made that go for 30 years and I can’t do that anymore. And I loved it. I’m not quitting ’cause I regret it at all. I would do it again in a minute if I could. But that part of it is what’s over. … The great Fear and Loathing in Folk experiment was a success. We figured out nothing.”
As our time together nears its end—and after dancing around the topic for over an hour—I feel obligated to ask Todd in no uncertain terms, “Are your days of hard touring done?”
I didn’t enjoy asking it, and I could tell Todd didn’t love hearing his own response to it: “I can’t see that happening again,” Snider exhales, his half-jokes of denial hardening into acceptance. “Yeah, I can’t see it happening again. It kills me. I want to do that again, but I don’t see that happening.”
Feeling guilty for ending the call on such a downer, I apologize to Todd, who attempts to placate me before relenting, “Not everything’s great all the time, but yeah, I was trying to think of something positive to end on.”
A silence hangs in the air. The only thing left for me to say is, “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom,” Todd’s favorite lyric of all time. Todd laughs. I can feel his smile from across the Southeast as he hangs up.
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