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The world has lost a light, and of the most unique, interesting, compelling, challenging, mercurial, iconoclastic, and influential songwriters to ever ply the craft. Todd Snider wasn’t just a singer of songs and a storyteller. He was a dynamo of insight and entertainment, often unable to be contained in the conventional vessels of an upright society, or the human form. He was more than an “Alright Guy,” he was the voice and conscience for a generation of alt listeners and general misfits.
On Friday afternoon (11-14), a message went out Todd Snider’s fans saying that after he returned home from Salt Lake City where his most recent tour ended in disaster, he began having trouble breathing and was admitted to the hospital in Hendersonville, TN, near Nashville. “We learned from his doctors that he had been quietly suffering from an diagnosed case of walking pneumonia,” the statement said.
When the statement continued on to say that his situation had become more complicated and that he’d been transferred for additional treatment, and “right now we’re asking everyone who loves Todd to hold him in your thoughts in whatever way feels right to you. Say a prayer, Light a candle, roll one up, send strength, or just keep him close to your heart,” you had a sense the situation was dire.
At about 8:30 am Central on Saturday morning, November 15th, Todd Snider’s official accounts posted, “Aimless, Inc. Headquarters is heartbroken to share that our Founder, our Folk Hero, our Poet of the World, our Vice President of the Abrupt Change Dept., the Storyteller, our beloved Todd Daniel Snider has departed this world … He relayed so much tenderness and sensitivity through his songs, and showed many of us how to look at the world through a different lens.“
Todd Snider was 59 years old.
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Todd Daniel Snider was born in Portland, Oregon and was raised in nearby Beaverton. After attending junior college in Santa Rosa, California briefly and dropping out, Snider ended up in San Marcos, TX, just 30 minutes down the road from Austin. While living there in the late ’80s, Snider saw Jerry Jeff Walker perform—just himself and a guitar—at the legendary Gruene Hall in nearby New Braunfels.
With little or no music experience beyond some harmonica, Todd Snider decided right then and there to become a songwriter. Todd bought a guitar, and started writing songs the very next day.
When you think of Todd Snider, you might not think of Texas or the Texas Music Scene, but Texas played a major role in his musical maturation. This is where he met Kent Finlay, the legendary proprietor of the Cheatham Street Warehouse. It was Finlay who introduced Todd to the music of songwriters like Guy Clark and John Prine. Soon Snider was drawing his own crowds in San Marcos songwriting rooms, as well as in Austin.
But it’s not San Marcos or Austin that would become synonymous with Todd Snider when his career took off. Snider’s debut album from 1994 called Songs for the Daily Planet was named after a club in Memphis that became Todd Snider’s home base after he moved there around 1990 to work with songwriter Keith Sykes. Snider’s father had moved to Memphis in 1989, and had passed Sykes a demo of his son’s stuff.
Keith Sykes introduced Todd Snider to two very significant people. The first was John Prine, who Todd would remain a close friend of and consider a mentor all the way up to Prine’s death on 2020. Sykes had also once been a member of Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band. Sykes got Snider on a show in California opening for Buffett, who personally witnessed Snider’s set, and offered him a deal on his Margaritaville Records, distributed by MCA.
Songs for the Daily Planet might have been written for audiences in a club in Memphis, but it would take Todd Snider nationwide. It was co-produced by Country Hall of Fame songwriter Tony Brown. It wasn’t really a country album though, and it wasn’t meant to be. It was more of an alt-country, singer/songwriter album with a full band. Among other notables, the album featured Eddy Shaver, the hot shot guitar player and son of Billy Joe Shaver who also was part of Snider’s touring band at times, along with guitarist Will Kimbrough.
The song whose importance seems to be forgotten from Snider’s first album was the hidden track at the very end, “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues.” It was a commentary on grunge music, told through a band that refused to play, but became successful anyway. It really was the song that introduced Snider to the world after it was picked up on college radio and even some mainstream rock stations. As a hidden track parody, it was the perfect anti-hit to launch Todd Snider’s unlikely career.
But “Alright Guy” was the song that would become Snider’s signature tune. Country artist Gary Allan even made it the title track to his 2001 album. Jerry Jeff Walker covered the song in 2001 too in a full circle moment for Todd Snider. Mark Chesnutt covered Snider’s song “Trouble” on his 1995 album Wings. No different than his songwriting heroes, Todd Snider was influencing mainstream country and landing cuts while still distinctly remaining himself.
Snider would release two more albums for Margaritaville/MCA, Step Right Up (1996) and Viva Satellite (1998). Neither was as successful as Songs for the Daily Planet, though some still consider Step Right Up one of Snider’s best. It was during the recording of Viva Satellite that things started to turn complicated for Snider. There were rumors of drug use, then tell-tale signs of it seen publicly.
In May of 1998 while Todd Snider was performing at a private party for MCA brass, he ended up insulting those in attendance early in the performance and then walked off stage. This was the first sign that the peace-loving, whimsical, storytelling Snider had a dark streak. He was ultimately dropped from the label.
However, Todd Snider found a soft landing with his friend John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, releasing three albums through the label, most notably 2004’s East Nashville Skyline. Similar to the early moments of his career, geography played a major role in the Todd Snider universe. The title was a play off of Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, but it really was Todd Snider helping to define the emerging influence of Nashville’s east side where creative types flocked to in order to get away from mainstream country’s power base, and to find affordable housing.
In the modern era, there really was East Nashville before Todd Snider’s 2004 album, and East Nashville afterwards. In many ways, the album helped spark the current independent country revolutionary era as so many performers from throwback hipster country types to indie rock-inspired Americana songwriters congregated in one geographical area. It wasn’t the title of East Nashville Skyline though, but songs like “Play a Train Song” and “The Ballad of the Kingsman” that made Snider like a guru to many up-and-coming musicians.
This was also the period that Todd Snider’s music became much more political. In 2008, he released an 8-song EP called Peace Queer, borrowed from a line from a song by the ’60s band The Fugs about “killing peace queers.” He later signed to Yep Rock Records to release the 2009 album The Excitement Plan produced by Don Was. But only on the label for one album, Todd moved on to Aimless records that released numerous albums, including fan favorite Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables from 2012.
Something else that elevated Todd Snider to cult hero status is that he’d written the first version of the song “Beer Run” that appeared on his 2002 album New Connection, though he’d been performing it live well before that. When Garth Brooks released a song of the same on his Scarecrow album, controversy and lawsuits ensued. Snider ended up writing a song called “If Tomorrow Never Comes” as sort of a kiss-off to the situation.
But Snider’s notorious battle with Garth Brooks also became one of Snider’s finest moments of wisdom. Writing about the situation in his book I Never Met A Story I Didn’t Like, Todd Snider revealed,
I loved Garth Brooks. I was, and am, a very big fan. I think Garth Brooks fucked up country music for a while, through no fault of his own: he made music so good and so successful that tons of people came along after him trying to imitate what he did. Garth fucked up country music like Kurt Cobain fucked up rock.
Because of Garth’s massive success, there’s a bit of a push and pull in Nashville about him. When you sell more records than anyone has ever sold, you tend to make more people jealous than have ever been jealous of a singer.
It’s a crock that I think prevails in this country: we bully the people who entertain us. We get on the computer and bully them. We buy magazines with pictures of them where they look fat or drunk or imperfect. And we suppose that those people’s success excuses our meanness.
This lesson would come to the forefront when news came down that Todd Snider had been arrested in Salt Lake City on November 2nd when he was seeing treatment at a hospital. Staff at the hospital said that Snider was harassing and refused to leave, but Snider insisted he needed further treatment, and had been the victim of an assault on Halloween, October 31st.
The details of exactly what happened remain shady, but local press and tabloid media that otherwise would have never written about Todd Snider had a field day with the details of the arrest, and splayed photos and video of the situation across the internet.
But that’s not how Todd Snider’s actual friends, fans, family, fellow songwriters will remember him. They will remember him as a man, a songwriter, and a storyteller like no other, not inhibited by the fears of what others might think, or how the world might judge him, but confident that it was his duty to share his thoughts, opinions, and experiences unfettered, uncensored, and often, unabridged with the rest of the universe.
Todd Snider is gone, but those songs, stories, and memories will live on through the countless fans he touched, and the songs and songwriters he inspired as his legacy ripples well into the unknown future.
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Editor’s Note: Elements of this story originally appeared in the article “The Ballad of Todd Snider.”
