Todd Snider spent much of his life idolizing singer songwriters such as John Prine, Kris Kristofferson and Billy Joe Shaver, whose material illuminated the human experience. Aiming to reach their level of artistic expression is one thing but falling into the same self-destructive patterns of those artists, going in and out of rehab, attempting to refocus through therapy and, as when he was busted for smoking marijuana, doing time in jail last year, Snider’s aspirations of equaling their significance brought with it a lot of unhealthy baggage. He attributes his songs as a result of these negative moments. To some degree they may be a lifeline that keeps him dancing on the edge rather than jumping over it. In the case of his incarceration, the track “Greencastle Blues” surfaced. It’s one of a dozen engrossing songs of self-assessment and storytelling on his latest release, The Excitement Plan.
With that album out, Snider aims to move in another direction. As he put it, “I think it’d be fun to be sane someday, and I don’t think that’s gonna happen if I write songs.”
Influenced by his immersion in the jamband scene as an opening act for Yonder Mountain String Band and summer festival appearances at Bonnaroo, All Good and 10,000 Lakes, he discovered the seamless musical give-and-take among the scene’s musicians and the living life to its fullest atmosphere by its fans. He’s hoping to go a step further and embrace it on an artistic level. For now that’s the Plan that’s got him excited.
JPG: The last time we talked was almost seven years ago.
TS: Oh…no shit. 2002. That would have been…
JPG: The New Connection album.
TS: Yeah, yeah.
JPG: There’s a publicity of you with your clean cut hair and all styled up.
TS: Oh yeah, that wasn’t such a clean cut period though, I’ll tell you that. That record was probably as bad as I ever got. (slight laugh) Those were good times though.
JPG: You survived it and moved on. I had the good fortune of catching you at the Bonnaroo and All Good festivals.
TS: Right on. Those were both a lot of fun. All Good, Bob Weir, I didn’t get to meet him or anything but he was standing around backstage and I just was excited by all that.
JPG: Were you apprehensive to talk to him?
TS: Yeah, I didn’t want to bug him, you know. But it was nice to watch him eat lunch.
JPG: Well speaking of All Good and Bonnaroo… I haven’t hit every festival in the past five years or so but I pay some degree of attention of who’s playing what. Have you played other festivals in the past? I know you’re doing around half a dozen this summer.
TS: This is the first summer I’ve done that outside of Telluride and Colorado Folk Festival and RockyGrass. I think that’s the same guy that does that – all three of those – and I’ve always gotten to play his festivals for the last five years or so. Also, Hardly Strictly [Bluegrass Festival], I’ve done that a couple times. But then the rest of ‘em, this is the first time I’ve gotten to do any of ‘em.
JPG: With those they are folk, rootsy, Americana type of crowds…
TS: Yeah. This is the first time I’ve gotten to be part of a jamband thing which is what I actually prefer. If I’m going to play a festival I’d like Widespread Panic to be going on later rather than Steve Earle…As much as I like him, it’s just not what I want to take my shoes off and be in the sun to.
JPG: Now, do you feel that a jamband audience is more receptive to what you do or is just a matter that when you’re done you can have a little fun?
TS: Both. It’s the people I prefer to play to, and I don’t want to knock people who don’t consider themselves, I guess what you’d say is a stoner maybe or of the stoner mentality or whatever it is that makes people…you can’t really call it a hippie…I’d like to think for that crowd, in particular, I’ve always liked to go and listen to that stuff but it wasn’t until Yonder Mountain String Band started taking me on the road that it felt like that I got introduced. Ever since I started opening for them there’s a good chance there will be girls at my show without their shoes on. (laughs)
JPG: (laughs) When did you hook up with Yonder?
TS: It’s been three years of so. I met Jeff Austin at a bar in Colorado and just hit it off immediately. And then I met them all. I just feel…we’re family.
JPG: The way Jeff’s persona is onstage. If he’s anything like that offstage I could see where you could hit it off immediately.
TS: In fact, sometimes him and Ben [Kaufmann] from Yonder and Vince Herman from Leftover Salmon will come and, if they have time off, we’ve done it twice, they’ll come and back me up unannounced. It’s a lot of fun. It’s most fun when they all fly to my house and the night before we have a big rehearsal at my house.
JPG: I can imagine it becomes like a big hootenanny. At those rehearsals, are you rehearsing your stuff or are you guys just messing around?
TS: (slight laugh) Yeah, that’s why…we touch on my stuff and it usually evolves into messing around and having fun. Playing whatever we feel like playing in the moment and then, ‘We’ll figure this shit out tomorrow night.’
JPG: And all of a sudden you have a lot of empties to pick up the next day.
TS: Yeah, that’s exactly right!
JPG: Back to festivals, I was there and the reaction was good at Bonnaroo and All Good. As a performer you’re normally headlining clubs and theaters, but in the case of these festivals where it’s not geared to a specific type of music and people aren’t very familiar with you, do you have to psyche yourself up? Do things differently?
TS: I guess when I’m playing it doesn’t matter to me. You just sorta trust the PA. But I should say this year at these festivals I’ve been watching and not necessarily…well, I guess, a little of both for the crowd but mostly for myself…I think it was right in the middle of Les Claypool’s set [at All Good] I said, ‘I sure hope I get to play these festivals again next year because I’m gonna bring a band.’ And I’ve been playing with this band, the Great American Taxi. And when I’ve been at these festivals I kept thinking, ‘I think I want to play with the Taxi.’
I was watching Widespread [at 10,000 Lakes] and RatDog [at All Good] and watching Les Claypool. And all three of them I thought, especially Les Claypool, because I got to stand at the side and watch him come out and decide which mask to put on. I was a foot from him as he was rummaging through his masks. It was exhilarating. But, just the way that he arranged it with the xylophone guy and the cello guy…they were making sounds; I don’t even know how they’re doing this.
I used to have a band but we weren’t open-ended like that so it got boring. I was bored out of it about four years into it. You know, the song starts the same every night, ends the same every night and the solo section’s the same every night. And the show is more thought out like say…I don’t want to say a Springsteen show isn’t open-ended but it kinda isn’t. It’s rehearsed and the light parts are rehearsed. It’s all pretty rehearsed. And there’s no part of the song where they look at each other and say, ‘Now, everybody. See what happens.’ That’s the new thing that I’ve been the most fascinated with musically. That’s when those guys are together I say, ‘Show me how we can just let the song go.’ I want to understand that.
You ever see when Widespread, they’ll be jamming and they’ll be jamming and jamming and then for no real explicit reason the whole entire groove will change and I want to go, ‘How do you guys do that?’ I don’t know they do that. Who cues that?’
- JPG: At this point, you see them or a band such as moe. you wonder if it’s almost mental telepathy.*
TS: I think that might be what it is and, see, I would like to be part of some of that. moe. too, I really like them and, of course, Phish. I like Phish, too.
JPG: This is all real interesting because the term ‘singer-songwriter’, which is normally attached to you, one would think that as one of those you wouldn’t want that dancing on the edge of a cliff musical aspect to your material.
TS: Yeah, none of my other songwriter friends want that. I know I’m real drawn to it and that’s where I’m hoping to go in the next few years if I live, if we all live, the good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. I like that. I like the idea of being in a group like that. I always thought that the Grateful Dead, you know that Robert Hunter he was a singer songwriter essentially, and he didn’t tour with those guys but…I would love to find a way to be the Arlo Guthrie of the…you know, he’s a hero to me and in his day he was part of the…I guess you just call it, what’s that magazine?... the High Times crowd. I don’t know what you call it because I’m careful not to call the young people anything because I’m 42 and I don’t want to fuck their buzz up and call them a stoner if they don’t want to be called stoners. I’m careful to call ‘em something but they tend to have hula hoops. Sometimes the chicks have wings and sometimes the guys’ll wear big funky hats or the guys’ll wear a skirt. That’s my idea of a good time.
JPG: I was taking pictures at All Good, but once my time at the front of stage was done I took lots of photos of the crowd because so many interesting things were going on.
TS: I got hang with JB (WSP’s John Bell) at 10,000 Lakes and I told him I was awestruck by what they built and what they had. I think that people, they get all that. They dress a certain way and come to the show. To me it sends a message that this band has spent a lifetime making sure that this crowd knew that this show wasn’t about them. That to me seems heavy. I think it’s about the people listening more than it is about the people playing or at least that’s what it appears to be like to me. Some people you can tell. They’re not going to look up and see that if JB strikes an interesting pose, they’re not going to see it. They’re spinning in their own thing. So, there’s no point in climbing the rafters, which is pretty unmusical anyway.
JPG: It’s interesting to get, not that you’re that much of an outsider, but a point of view from someone who’s a bit outside of the scene.
TS: Yeah, if I had to say I was part of something, I’m an Americana singer. I’d rather be a…I don’t know about that. I love those guys. Their party’s okay. They’re not stoners. I’m the only stoner there. And there ain’t nobody eating no mushrooms over there. Except me.
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?
JPG: And it goes back to the idea of whether they feel that there’s a connection between that and songwriting, that if they approach it sober it won’t happen.
TS: I think there’s been some of that for me. But now I feel like I’ve got so many songs and I’m still excited to play those songs, which I feel makes me lucky. Rather than write new songs I would like to, musically, explore my old ones for awhile. I’ve been really getting into my guitar playing. I’d really like to play. I’d like to be a better player five years from now than I am now. And I don’t care if I’m any better as a t-shirt salesman.
JPG: On “Don’t Tempt Me” you sing with Loretta Lynn.
TS: We wrote that song together, too.
JPG: What was that experience like? How did you two even come together?
TS: One of her twin daughters is married to, I would say my best friend, a guy named Mark Marchetti. He’s a poet and a writer that I’ve known for 10 years before they were married. Anyway, when he married her, I’m pretty sure that’s when my music crept into their home. Then, last year she started getting ready to work on a record and she made a list of people she wanted to write songs with. Mark called and said, ‘She put you down.’ I said, ‘You’re kiddin’ me!’ So then she called. She has a house downtown and then she has what I call the City outside of town. She has a town outside of town. The first time I went down to the house she has on the [Music] Row, and I think we made up “Don’t Tempt Me.” Had a good time. She’s got a great sense of humor. She’s very pretty, too. So, made that up and then we talked about that song on the phone for awhile. She came and cut it, and then I went back out to her house and we made up another one called “She’s Got Everything It Takes To Take Everything We’ve Got” and her and Elvis Costello sing that. And that’s coming out pretty soon on her album. I’m very excited about that.
JPG: Now, how did you nab “Don’t Tempt Me” for your album rather than it going to hers?
TS: I felt like even as we were working on it, once we started it we knew it was kind of like a rock ‘n’ roll song and we liked it. The first song we started, we sat down to make up a song for her but a verse and a chorus into it we knew we were making one up for me. I remember I had called her and said, ‘Is it okay if I cut this?’ And she said, ‘Sure.’
Both times I didn’t do much. It was more like I got a free lesson and I held the notepad and she showed me a bunch of shit I didn’t know.
