“…life's too short to worry, life's too long to wait,
too short not to love everybody, life's too long to hate
I meet a lot of men who haggle and finagle all the time
Trying to save a nickel or make a dime,
not me, no sireee, I ain't got the time.”
Popular culture has a thing for curating commoditized versions of the real thing. What that “real thing” constitutes is hard to define, and largely up to the beholder.
Personally, when art is tapped into a sort of universal appeal that presents a vision in a work that feels like it’s been here all along, to me, that is the real thing. That’s a cosmic energy that the creators have tapped into.
It’s beautiful to find honest expression within the marketplace of ideas, but on the other hand, most “real deal” creators languish in obscurity and die without any of the rewards or creature comforts that watered-down versions of their vision usually accumulate.
The late, great Todd Snider was the real deal, and about the closest thing to a superstar that folk/Americana singer-songwriter circles have known for the past four decades. When he died on Nov. 14 from complications of pneumonia, it would be beyond blasé to say that the music world incurred a big loss. To many folks, they lost a hero.
Snider occupied a rare, but essential, place in American music – the singer/songwriter whose art isn’t just about melody and rhyme but bearing witness. Today, when so much of our entertainment options feel pre-packaged, polished to death and filtered for mass appeal, Snider put it all out there, and his power came from the perspective of someone who saw the world a bit differently.
Todd Snider could write any kind of song, be it the most beautiful gospel song you’d ever hear (“Somebody’s Comin’”) to a folk ballad about a baseball player pitching a no-hitter while fried on LSD (“America’s Favorite Pastime”), Snider was funny, poignant, sharp, rambling and rebellious.
The subject matter of his vast catalog ranged from music history ephemera (“The Ballad of the Kingsmen”) to character sketches of folks like the kind and wise old bartender Miss Virgie (“The Ballad of the Devil’s Backbone Tavern”) to the chronicle of Moondawg, a man who got so tired of being kicked out of bars that the built one in his own backyard.
Those who got Snider’s brand of genius extended far beyond the cult of musicians and songwriters that normally form the secret fan club for such an artist, although so many artists and bands, ranging from Mark Chesnutt to Tom Jones, took his songs and interpreted them into hits. Snider had a large following, and even those with stiff upper lips could find something to laugh about and something to think about in what he sang and spoke about.
Snider could silence a room with his guitar, those songs and his side-splittingly funny between-song stories, some of which would, as he was wont to remind his audiences, go on for up to 18 minutes. One of the greatest shows I’ve ever witnessed was in 2015 at Cheatham Street Warehouse where Snider played solo acoustic and was spitting straight fire for two hours.
That show was especially poignant for him, for that little honky-tonk by the tracks in San Marcos was the place where he, as an Oregon émigré in the mid-1980s, learned about songwriting and a lot about life, itself, largely from his mentor Kent Finlay. Finlay was a legendary songwriter, himself, and the owner of Cheatham Street, and he’d died a few months before that show in 2015.
Snider’s music and his presentation of it owed to such legends as Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and of course, his heroes Jerry Jeff Walker, John Prine and Jimmy Buffett, but also to literary titans like Hunter S. Thompson and Ken Kesey.
From the beginning of his career, Snider wrote about the kinds of characters and situations that most mainstream narratives ignored. The voice he gave to drifters, oddballs and idealists, and to the wounded and the wandering, as well as the wonderfully strange, was a beautiful thing. Todd Snider had a rare egalitarian view of humanity and an accompanying compassion that found worth in everyone and every place. When people make knee-jerk statements of virtue-signaling like “all lives matter,” it’s usually a reactionary political statement, but Todd Snider actually meant it.
Snider’s style of storytelling, to me, was the equivalent of a warm, bright campfire off the side of some winding farm-to-market road: welcoming and open to anyone who wanted to sit down and listen. That sort of openness, in of itself, is a type of cultural resistance, and those songs that insist that every life, especially the unconventional ones, contain something worth hearing and knowing about.
For a society that is too often comfortably sliding into sameness, certain textures that help make life interesting are lost, and in that, the friction that sparks growth, empathy and perspective are also lost. Artists like Todd Snider keep that friction alive, and keep the walls from closing in.
There will always be a need for a voice that helps to keep the world weird (in the eyes of some), honest and human, and the songs and presence of Todd Snider will persist long after his mortal self is gone. There will always be a need for someone in the arts to tell the stories that are a bit rough around the edges and to argue for the beauty of individuality in a world that too often prefers the illusion of uniformity and the homogenization of thought.
Shortly after Todd Snider passed, another great artist made a heartfelt statement about him. Cody Canada, of Cross Canadian Ragweed, is one who certainly flies the same flag that Snider flew. Canada said that he’d lost his hero, and implored anyone seeing his statement, which was released to social media, to listen to one song by Snider, and then to another one, “because he speaks the truth.”
“Nowadays people are afraid to talk about their feelings in music. All they want to do is sell a record. But once upon a time what people wanted to do was touch a heart and soul. That’s what Todd Snider did.”
So true, Cody. So incredibly true.
