Opening Statement
I may never know the road I’m on
The here-and-now or the gone
The coming home or the running away
You gonna miss my laugh someday
Somewhere along the way
Somewhere along the way
Being a music journalist and thinking you’re friends with the artists you cover is a lot like falling in love with a prostitute. On a fundamental level, the relationship is transactional.
I won’t sit here and say I was friends with Todd Snider. We were friendly. He told me to drop by and smoke a joint with him next time he was in town, though I’m sure there’s a trail of roaches from Portland, OR, to Portland, ME, littered with the same offer. It’s an invitation I regret missing even more following his sudden death on Friday, November 14th at the age of 59 (though that weed would have given me horrible anxiety—hardly the rugged music journalist image I was trying to project to somebody who embodied effortless cool as well as Todd Snider).
We spoke three times over four years for no more than three total hours. I wouldn’t say I knew him intimately well, partly because after nearly a decade of listening to his music and our several conversations, I learned that to know Todd Snider was to admit that you didn’t know anything. Like Todd once said about one of his periods of heavy psychedelic experimentation, “everything starts to get debatable.” But one thing I think I knew from the first time we spoke over the phone in 2021 was that Todd Snider seemed to be the exact same guy offstage as he was onstage.
Even with all his forthrightness, though, there was still a Dylanesque mystery to him. He was a man of contradictions, as Kris Kristofferson, one of his many mentors, said about Johnny Cash, Jerry Jeff Walker, and many more ramblin’ men in whose footsteps Todd followed, “partly truth and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on that lonely way back home.” That was Todd. Though if he were here, he’d be sure to counter that he doesn’t believe in a “right direction.” Todd introduced me to the work of Albert Camus, the French author whose 1942 classic The Stranger holds some keys to deciphering Snider’s own absurdist philosophy.
“Agnostics believe in things, they just admit they don’t know first,” Snider told me in our first conversation in 2021. “You can’t really have a faith without being agnostic. You can’t believe in something until you don’t know for sure. So I’m not knocking, like, believing or beliefs because I have them, but they start with an ‘I don’t know.’ … I’m wide open to what might happen when I die. I don’t have a guess, but that doesn’t mean I don’t definitively think other people’s guess isn’t true. I don’t know. That’s what I feel like, if I go to the gate and I get grilled at some gate, I’m going to say I didn’t know. I couldn’t figure it out. But I’m open to anything. I believe in love, forgiveness, magic.”
But from that first conversation through the last one a little over a year ago, there was always an undercurrent of pain. In 2021, it was more an emotional pain than the physical pain that would define his final years. At the time, he was coming off the deaths of his heroes-turned-friends John Prine, Billy Joe Shaver, and Jerry Jeff Walker, close contemporaries Neal Casal and Jeff Austin, and Zambi guru Col. Bruce Hampton in only three years.
“I feel like I threw myself into that record because it was getting pretty unbearable. Just kept coming,” Snider said in 2021 of his album The First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder. “I lost my dog, too. My first manager… I lost a lot of friends in the last year. I’ve had a couple that went on purpose. That’s been really hard and I’m grateful in times like this to have this outlet where I can sing, even if I was just singing on my porch, and it’s healing for the one doing it. It just breaks my heart, all of it. And it was already in pieces, I would suppose.”
Reflecting in 2023 on the loss of his mentors, he said, “I’m just trying to process all these phone numbers that don’t work anymore. There’s tons of them.”
In his later years, that emotional pain was joined by physical suffering. In the fall of 2023, Todd canceled an ongoing tour so he could undergo surgery for a persistent stomach issue—something he attributed to a lifetime of pre-show anxiety. He spent the next year off the road as well, due to a worsening case of stenosis, a condition that constricted spaces in his spine and caused them to clamp down on his nerve roots, “like you’re one nerve and it’s pinched,” he told me in 2024.
“The world’s getting on my nerve,” Todd chuckled, in one of his trademark deflections that masked the pain he must have felt nearly every waking moment.
Todd Snider would not complete another tour for the rest of his life. Some sporadic one-off shows followed, including a couple installments of his Camp What The Folk immersive songwriting experience. While he ruefully relented in 2024 that his days of heavy touring were done, he set his sights on a brief comeback run with a new band.
After a successful trial run of a few summer dates in the Southeast, he announced a 13-date, seven-state 2025 fall tour of the Western United States. His first album of all-new original material in four years, High, Lonesome and Then Some, soon followed. The stylistic gypsy upended tradition once again with a lofi blues-based concept album that hinted at yet another new chapter. The future looked bright for Todd Snider.
But within a month, he had died.
From the fan perspective, the last week and change of Todd Snider’s life was a violent rollercoaster of historic hope, resurgent fear, and shocking grief. After one show outside Denver, Snider and his band traveled to Salt Lake City, where Todd was allegedly assaulted outside his hotel. His record label, Aimless Records Inc., canceled the remaining 12 dates before it was reported that Todd had been arrested in Salt Lake City following the incident. Eleven days later, his family and friends revealed he was hospitalized with walking pneumonia. The next morning, Saturday, November 15th, they announced he had died.
His departure left many unanswered questions, but hastily answering them seems only to be a priority for online tabloids and those who saw Todd as just a list of substances consumed and tribulations faced. Those closest to him—like one of his best friends, Otis Gibbs, who got the whole story from the man himself in the days before Todd died—are respectfully keeping this last story within the family. But this isn’t a story that we (the public) need to know, or are even entitled to know. Prurient interest in his last days should not overshadow his legacy. Todd Snider, the storyteller, left us with plenty of other stories over the years…
A 31-Year Distraction From Our Impending Doom
You don’t need Wikipedia to learn who Todd Snider was. Between live albums Near Truths and Hotel Rooms (2003, the perfect starting point for anyone new), The Storyteller (2011), and Return of the Storyteller (2022), he lays out most of the major points of his life—and goes into even greater detail in his excellent 2014 autobiography, I Never Met A Story I Didn’t Like: Mostly True Tall Tales. Even with some live stories that famously went on for as long as 18 minutes, there were still some details he left out, and his book omits very little.
We were there with him in high school in Beaverton, OR, when he tried psychedelic mushrooms for the first time and knew he was never going back to football practice. We were there senior year when he wrote (technically, cleaned) “Todd Snider Rules” on the Multnomah County Tunnel, and some years later when he embarrassingly did it again. He took us along on his fateful trip to the Devil’s Backbone Tavern when he met Ms. Virgie, seeing Jerry Jeff for the first time, and, of course, that time he didn’t meet NASCAR legend Bill Elliott.
He took us along for the hard times, too. As all that loss poured down on him, it bloomed into reflections “Handsome John” for John Prine, “Sail on, My Friend” for Jeff Austin, “Turn Me Loose (I’ll Never Be The Same)” for Col. Bruce and Jerry Jeff, and even “Play A Train Song” for the self-proclaimed Mayor of East Nashville, Skip Litz. Todd helped all of us process our grief, distilling decades of scattershot memories into four-minute memoriums.
His vulnerability was just as essential to who Todd was as his wiseass lyrical bent. While we laughed with Todd, we stumbled with him too, and later cried with him as we shared the same losses. It’s part of the reason so many people—whether they interviewed him or saw him live or listened to his records—feel like they were his friends: he shared his life with us. Todd was the bathroom wall that everyone got to write on, and he freely gave himself up as the canvas.
“I was out trying to find the song in the chaos of what was going on,” he said in 2024. “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, thrilling.”
While that madness made for plenty of good stories, some of Todd’s most impactful songwriting came from the mundane. Todd saw things in the world that we didn’t: simple things, complex things made simple, and simple things made into the meaning of life. That could’ve been a tree turning into the morning paper, a business’s framed first dollar, or a statistic he found in an in-flight magazine. Todd taught us we never had to grow up, a Patron Saint of the Smartass and the King of the Bums.
He wove narratives that were autobiographical (“Tilamook County Jail“), historical (“D.B. Cooper“, “America’s Favorite Pasttime“), locally historical (“Moon Dawg’s Tavern“), shared adolescent experiences (“Beer Run“), and even one so cinematic that the 4:37-minute song was turned into a 104-minute film (“Just Like Old Times“). The stories he’d tell out of East Nashville were like a Southeast version of The Merry Pranksters but with newer records.
“It felt like you can use words to do anything and that they’re just sounds coming out of people’s faces,” Snider told me in 2023 about one of his philosophical phases, one that partially led him to shelve his 2007 album Crank It, We’re Doomed for 16 years. “It feels like it was a really arbitrary thing that people invented. Sometimes I think that music notes are the way we were supposed to communicate.
“The older I get, the more I think beats and notes are more expressive,” Todd clarified when pressed on his philosophy. “Booker T. & the M.G.’s probably say more than me. But then words, the alphabet is what I played, so that’s how I got in the band.”
While a singer-songwriter calling language a mistake may seem paradoxical and contrary to the entire folk movement, it actually explains some of his studio tendencies. In the first half of Todd’s career, while bouncing around various major and independent labels, including Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Records (distributed by MCA), Prine’s Oh Boy Records (where he was the first non-Prine signee, allowing “us to become a ‘real’ record label,” John’s widow wrote in a tribute), and Universal, his studio albums carried more of a dissident country, proto-y’allternative sound. They could’ve probably gotten on country radio if nobody listened to the lyrics too closely.
“I wanted to be too rock for country and too country for rock,” Todd told Otis Gibbs in 2024.
Once he launched his own Aimless Records in the late 2000s, however, Snider charted increasingly adventurous studio expeditions. His 2012 rockabilly record Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables set the stage for the wide debut of his garage rock alter ego, Elmo Buzz, on 2016’s Eastside Bulldog. Then in 2021, he pioneered his own new sound for First Agnostic Church, something he called “fatback,” a crossfire hurricane of Parliament mixed with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Though, as Todd looked back in 2024, he had a more critical view of some of his choices.
“It didn’t serve me to put that s–t 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.”
To use Todd’s own words against him, “All I know for sure with all my heart / Is how every turn so far / Seemed like the right thing, at the time.”
Todd Snider — “Mercer’s Folly”
Todd Snider released 15 original studio albums beginning with his 1994 debut, Songs for the Daily Planet, through High, Lonesome and Then Some, which arrived exactly four weeks before his death. Listening back to Todd’s music now, it’s hard not to connect every lyric back to his passing, particularly on High, Lonesome and Then Some. The slow, bluesy crawl amplifies the lethargy in his voice. Maybe it’s from the chronic health issues, some of which he sings about, or maybe it’s from his broken heart, a focal point of the album. In “It’s Hard to Be Happy (Y is for Redneck)”, the refrain, “It’s hard to be happy, even when there’s nothing wrong,” is a gut-punch of grief.
Much like Warren Zevon—another songwriter admired far more by critics and his contemporaries than the general public and a fellow chronic self-sabotager—Todd’s lyrics are eerily prescient in the wake of his death. The tributes he wrote for others now apply to mourning him, a macabre double entendre from a master songsmith. In his absence, he still hopes for us to play our music loud enough to wake up all of our neighbors, “Or at least loud enough / To always wake yourself up.”
And it’s my deepest hope for him that he died laughing in his sleep.
Where Will I Go, Now That I’m Gone?
Despite the massive trove of songs Todd Snider wrote over his lifetime, there was one that taunted him for decades. It was called “Where Will I Go, Now That I’m Gone?” and per his last live album, he still hadn’t finished it. He even wrote another song about trying to write that song.
But you know, giving up a dream is just like making one come true
It’s easy to sit around talking about, it’s harder to go out and do
But for this one last question, I’ll give up on this song
“Where Will I Go Now That I’m Gone?”
Todd Snider — “Working On A Song”
Todd Snider gave his life to the song. From the time he was 19 through his final weeks 40 years later, he was out chasing songs everywhere he went. As someone once said about a dude not unlike Todd, “I don’t know about you but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there. … Takin’ ‘er easy for all us sinners.” For Todd, it was all he ever wanted to do.
“I would love to always like it as much as I like it now,” Todd said in 2000 when asked what hopes and dreams he had for his career. Almost a quarter of a century later, reflecting on the apparent end of his touring days, he said, “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.”
Todd saw Jerry Jeff Walker at Texas’ Gruene Hall in 1985 and thought, “s–t, I can do that.” Then he went out and did. Along the way, he met his heroes, they became his friends, and he recorded and toured with them. John Prine, Jerry Jeff, Billy Joe, Kris Kristofferson, they all gave Todd Snider the troubadour seal of approval. As the class before him passed on, Snider became the living link between the old guard and the next generation of songwriters. In much the same way, Sierra Ferrell, Hayes Carll, Aaron Lee Tasjan, Rachel Cole, and Evan Nicole Bell were all lit by the flame Todd carried from those who came before him.
“They say pass it on, and it just feels like an instinctive duty,” Snider said in 2024. “I will see somebody like that. And in my mind, I feel like I see what those guys [Prine, Kristofferson, etc.] saw, which is, it feels like if somebody can’t do anything else.”
Todd had a simple goal in life, and he accomplished it. He may have gotten battered and beaten down by the world, arrested, divorced, sober, unsober, and criticized along the way, but his entire philosophy was centered around taking on whatever life threw at him. Todd absorbed it all, for better and many times for worse, and gave us those experiences as transmuted through his perspective and his soul. And something about knowing he accomplished what he set out to do, spent his life doing, makes his absence just a little bit easier to take. On the grandest possible scale, Todd served his life’s purpose. He made his own meaning of existence, something all of us can only hope to have achieved when our time is up.
“I realized, I think, that this was what I wanted to do,” Todd said of playing his first open mic when he was 19. “I didn’t know that I could, but I knew that I just wanted to chase songs around. And if I could find a way to pull that off and get away with it, I would be eternally grateful.
“This was almost like an experiment of how long can you go on without any concern for the future,” he told me in 2024, in what turned out to be our final conversation. “And it was a gas, gas, gas. … The great Fear and Loathing in Folk experiment was a success. We figured out nothing.”
Like “Where Will I Go”, I don’t know how to end this piece. There’s part of me that can’t accept this might be the last Todd Snider feature I ever write. I don’t want to let go. But what more can I say for the man who said it all, who said the things we didn’t even know we felt?
For all the stories that Todd told, there are probably even more about Todd, many of them being told right now (Otis Gibbs is holding quite a few of them). Todd was a machine of perpetual happenstance. And now the rest of us get to tell our Todd Snider stories since the Master isn’t here anymore, and we look a little better at it without him here to compare ourselves to. Todd made the world a funnier, less frightening place, and an easier one to face.
Maybe the only thing left to say is Todd’s favorite lyric of all time. Something that sums up the entirety of human consciousness; a line that is both everything and nothing in perfect balance. It’s also one of the last things I ever said to him.
“A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom.”
Todd Snider — “Like A Force Of Nature” — GemsOnVHS™
Rest in chaos, Todd Snider. Thank you for everything you told me.