JPG: The song “America’s Favorite Pastime.” What I like so much about it was that to me the punchline, if you will, the line that reveals that the baseball pitcher is on LSD doesn’t come until the very end. And it just made me think about the quality of your songwriting that the way that you shaped the song. There are descriptions in there where some people will get it. You use the word ‘hallucinate’ at one point, but the structure and the shape of the song itself, is that a conscious decision or did it just flow like where the punchline just came…
TS: I knew I wasn’t going to mention LSD ‘til the last verse. From the beginning that was the first kind of concrete idea when I was thinking of the map of how the song would go. There’s a guy named Shel Silverstein who used to write songs for Bobby Bare, probably more than anyone the main person I copy. And if you check out his songs, he tends to have one of those at the end a lot. In my mind when I was working on that song, I thought Shel Silverstein would have saved this part. He wouldn’t have said this until the end. I do a lot of that, ‘What would Shel Silverstein do? How would he try to communicate?’ In my mind his style was sort of like if he wanted to tell you in his mind… like say if he saw something about a war and he wanted to speak his piece on how to end the war or not how to end it but how he’d like it to end, I think, because I wouldn’t say he was one of those pretentious guys. He’d just say, ‘I don’t like it.’ Almost at the opposite of John Lennon where like when he says I just want to give peace a chance, I feel like Shel would have written a story song with some ending you didn’t see coming and then the fifth time that you hear the song you realize that he’s trying to influence or share his opinion about something. It’s the fifth listen when you realize that Shel’s point was to tell you power to the people. But the first two listens you think you’re hearing “Harper Valley PTA” or you’re just hearing a story. You’re hearing like “The Gambler” or something. He didn’t write those. But he did write “Marie Laveau” or “The Winner.” “A Boy Named Sue,” you don’t expect that. That’s a perfect example, I guess. You don’t expect it to end for his dad to tell him, ‘I named you Sue so you’d be as tough as you are.’ Awwwww, cool. (slight laugh)
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JPG: As far as anti-war music, “Bring ‘Em Home” off The Excitement Plan surprised me that it didn’t end up on Peace Queer (Snider’s 2008 EP that found him expanding his personal outlook towards the social and political worlds.)
TS: I don’t know what it was. There was something in my mind as I was making these records, I had “Bring ‘Em Home” and I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll save one.’ I had “Stuck On The Corner” which is on Peace Queer. For some reason, I was like I’m going to take one The Excitement Plan song and put it on Peace Queer and put one Peace Queer song on The Excitement Plan. And, hopefully, there will be some continuity with these things.
Now, I think I’m gonna to make, like a…it sounds so, I probably shouldn’t even go into it because it’s really just a bunch of songs but in my mind, however pretentious it may sound, maybe it’s not pretentious, but one more little album of 10 songs coming and they’re two-minute really fast rock songs that are only about chicks and cars and partying hard. I don’t even know if any jamband people would like it unless they like that song “Louie Louie.”
JPG: Who doesn’t like “Louie Louie?”
TS: (laughs) I have a side band called Elmo Buzz and the East Side Bulldogs but we only play in East Nashville. And it started off where we just did stuff like “Splish Splash” and shit like that, and then started making up our own songs that are just rip-offs of “Splish Splash” and shit like that. But it’s so fuckin’ fun to do. We have a sax guy and two guitarists and a Farfisa/organ/piano and we try to sound like the Animals or the Troggs or any kind of band that has a ‘The’ in front of it and then some insect after it. It’s so fun to do. It’s so loud. And then for my day job, my main passion, I want to join up with the Great American Taxi and start taking my folk sound and taking it in a Grateful Dead/ Little Feat meets Jerry Jeff Walker/J.J. Cale thing. I’m ready to play with a drummer again.
JPG: We’ve kind of covered this, but based on the time lapse since we last spoke. Were you mainly interested in writing the best songs you possibly could seven years ago whereas now you still want to write the best song you can but you also want to expand the parameters?
TS: I don’t know. I think would always… Here’s the funny part of the plan. I have a company called Aimless Inc. and I’m the vice-president of the Abrupt Plan Changing Department so all this could change, but in my mind I kind of want to get in a band and give the writing a rest for a few years. The songs that I made up for the Bulldogs record, I had a rule that these songs you can’t take them seriously. And if they don’t say, ‘Baby’ in them you have to throw ‘em out, and if you don’t make up a word like ‘wopbopaloop’, fuck it. I didn’t want there to be any pressure on myself. I almost felt like this is going to be my last, like I worked so hard on those songs for The Excitement Plan, and the last three records, I feel like I worked real hard on writing and editing and challenging myself. So, I said to my manager, ‘Okay, now I’m gonna do something where I don’t hardly work hard, don’t edit, don’t challenge, don’t do shit. We’re gonna turn it up and I’m gonna go, ‘BABY BABY BABY’ and we’re gonna rock.’ Even if we don’t put it out, I don’t care. I just wanted to get that out of my system and then spend three or four years, maybe, try to get a band together and not worry about writing at all.
JPG:. As I was doing the research I read that you mentioned writing is a therapeutic exercise for you when you go into a dark mood or from dark to light. Now, it sounds like writing doesn’t help because it’s a new set of anxieties.
TS: I wonder. Maybe so. A lot of those things that caused me so much angst in my life I’m starting to let them go. I definitely don’t want to hang on to them for songs.
JPG: That’s nice to hear because the next thing I was going to ask was whether you fear that you’d lose your creative spark, as if you feel that going through those dark moods are what’s necessary to bring out songs, as if it’s a nice by product because you have these songs to show for it. But on the hand, if you feel sane will the artistic well go dry?
TS: I don’t know if it will ‘cause I have to say for the last year I’ve been in that mindset. It feels like the less I care about coming up with music the more I do. So, even if it works out that way where I’m like, ‘Fine, I just don’t care about it anymore,’ and it just comes out. That’s sort of how it started anyway.
JPG: Maybe that is the case, from the lack of thinking about a career maybe you’re finally able to relax and just do it.
TS: Yeah, that’s what I feel like. And I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever been, in fact I would say more than anybody I know, I’ve just never been a career -oriented person. It’s weird. In my experience my whole life the audience is John Prine, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, Jerry Jeff Walker, Randy Newman, Bobby Bare. And I stress myself, I don’t actually go out and see what they think but when I’m at home at night and I’m working on my songs I’m like, ‘I have to carry on their tradition in a way that’s befitting of how hard they worked and how open-hearted they were.’ I hate to put that kind of pressure on myself but on the other hand if I was gonna put pressure on myself that’s the pressure I want. I didn’t worry about what kind of car I was driving or if I was on the radio. I was worrying whether Billy Joe Shaver felt like it was okay that I was the guy coming behind him or would he be like, ‘Fuck…’
JPG: You see what kind of toll it’s put on them.
TS: And me, too! There always seems to be drugs involved every time you hear that story. It’s a cliché but a lot of clichés are clichés because they’re time-tested. Is it cliché or time-tested that songwriters get fucked up and get some tunes out of that?
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