Todd Snider, a singer, songwriter, and raconteur who helped shape the alt-country and Americana music movements, died Friday. He was 59. Rolling Stone confirmed Snider’s death. No cause of death was given, but Snider reportedly was diagnosed with pneumonia this week.
“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,” a message read on Snider’s Facebook page.
Born in Portland, Oregon, and relocating to northern California after high school, Snider rambled his way to Texas in the 1980s, where he met and was mentored by the songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker. In the Nineties, he migrated to Nashville, becoming a key figure in the rough-edged East Nashville scene. His 2004 album East Nashville Skyline is considered essential to the alt-country catalog.
“I’ve always been into being a troubadour. I love the chaos, that life of adventure — that’s what struck me. I had a predisposition for it,” Snider told Rolling Stone in 2023. “I was a hitchhiker and sofa circuit person. Jerry Jeff made me see that the difference between a free spirit and a freeloader is three chords on the guitar.”
Along with Walker, Snider befriended and learned from songwriting greats like Billy Joe Shaver, John Prine, Jimmy Buffett, Guy Clark, and Kris Kristofferson. “Nobody’s ever deserved there to be a heaven more than John Prine,” Snider told Rolling Stone in 2020 following the singer-songwriter’s death. “And if there’s not a heaven, they oughta get one together pretty quick, because John’s coming.”
The loss of each of those guiding lights for Snider (Walker died six months after Prine) shook the musician — “I sing about dead friends more than girls these days,” he said in the press materials for what would be his last album, 2025’s High, Lonesome and Then Some. But they also left him as the flag-bearer for a certain type of songwriting, one informed by lived experiences, both good and bad, and plainspoken, honest lyricism.
“One thing I learned from John Prine is if you’re not embarrassing yourself, then I don’t know,” Snider told Rolling Stone in 2014. “You don’t want to just be that guy, trying to present themselves as the perfect product. I’m not a product. You know, like Kathie Lee Gifford-type people. I just saw her on TV. And if she wrote a book, I bet you it would just be full of her not ever making mistakes.”
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Snider reveled in life’s mistakes — whether he learned from them or not wasn’t the point. “You’re gonna mix my emotions and you’re gonna tangle my net/You’re gonna make me do somethin’/that I’m afraid I won’t regret,” he sang in the bold-faced cheating song “Trouble,” off his 1994 debut, Songs for the Daily Planet. The fan favorite “Alright Guy,” off that same LP, found him admitting flaws like smoking too much weed and having a propensity for getting arrested. “But I think I’m an alright guy,” he countered in the lyrics.
In his 2014 memoir, I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like, Snider openly shared many of his missteps with the world, proving himself just as fearless an author as he was a songwriter. In one tale, he recalled an onstage meltdown during a show in L.A.; in another, he detailed an incident in which Jimmy Buffett, infuriated by Snider’s refusal to play the song “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues” in his opening set, pelted him with fruit.
That mix of stubbornness and courageousness is what endeared Snider to fans and peers alike. While artists from Gary Allan and Mark Chesnutt to Loretta Lynn and Tom Jones all recorded his songs, and he released Songs for the Daily Planet (with Buffett’s help) on the major label MCA, Snider never abandoned his DIY roots. He put out a strings of albums for Prine’s indie label, Oh Boy Records, beginning with 2000’s Happy to Be Here and culminating with the 2004 masterpiece East Nashville Skyline. The latter contained one of Snider’s signatures, “Play a Train Song,” which Robert Earl Keen recorded in 2011.
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In 2008, Snider founded his own label, Aimless Records, and issued the EP Peace Queer, a collection of politically biting songs. In 2012, he paid tribute to Walker with an album of his songs, and then unflinchingly probed life in a haves-and-have-nots America with Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables, released that same year.
Snider toured relentlessly, both solo and as part of his side project Hard Working Americans with Widespread Panic’s Dave Schools and the late guitarist Neal Casal. On the road, he entertained crowds with his dry wit and wealth of stories. At one show, he found himself performing with his friend, the comedian Richard Lewis, who opened for Snider and then laughed at him from the balcony when the crowd filtered out ahead of the musician’s set. Snider didn’t mind. “If you can play and sing, you can go anywhere you want and you don’t need any money,” Snider once told RS.
But the rigors of the road took their toll and Snider developed debilitating back issues, which he medicated with pills. Various battles with drug addiction and stints in rehab pockmarked his career. Still, Snider soldiered on with music, playing livestreamed shows during the pandemic from his studio-slash-clubhouse, the Purple Building, in East Nashville, and releasing latter-day albums like 2021’s First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder and 2023’s Crank It, We’re Doomed. In the fall of 2025, he released High, Lonesome and Then Some, an album of loping blues-like numbers with titles like “Unforgivable (Worst Story Ever Told).”
Despite his chronic pain, Snider, ever the road warrior, was determined to tour behind the album. “I at least want to do it one more time,” he said. Shortly after the tour commenced, however, it was canceled after Snider was involved in a murky incident in Salt Lake City, Utah, that landed him in jail.
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“It’s all heartache,” Snider told Rolling Stone in October, offering a glimpse into the ongoing emotional and physical struggles he was facing. “I wouldn’t say I’m better, and I don’t think I’m going to get better, but the last decade was hard in my personal life,” he said. “In the last couple of years, it’s gotten harder, and I felt like the title [High, Lonesome and Then Some]. I sat out here by myself and had, like, a dark night of the soul.”
“How do we move forward without the one who gave us countless 90 minute distractions from our impending doom?,” a message announcing Snider’s death read. “The one who always had 18 minutes to share a story. We’ll do it by carrying his stories and songs that contain messages of love, compassion, and peace with us. Today, put on one of your favorite Todd Snider records and ‘play it loud enough to wake up all of your neighbors or at least loud enough to always wake yourself up.’”
