There was magic in the air when Todd Snider took the stage Nov. 10 at a sold-out Stuart’s Opera House. 

The crowd was amped. Snider was all smiles and, as the (unplayed) song goes, happy to be here. And a Thursday night in Southeast Ohio felt like a Saturday in the big city. 

Having been on the road constantly since quarantine lifted, Snider might have thought it was the weekend. He sure played like it was. 

The songs were focused. The stories were hilarious. And the requests were granted. 

“I know all that shit,” Snider said through a Cheshire grin before playing … all that shit. 

There were songs with spelling (“Beer Run”); songs with math (“Statistician’s Blues”); comical observations (“Doublewide Blues”); romantic ballads (“All My Life”); robust rockers (“Ballad of the Devil’s Backbone Tavern”); and train songs (“Play a Train Song” -> “Georgia on a Fast Train” -> “Train Song”). 

The audience sung along loudly, cheered every harmonica solo and stomped their feet on Stuart’s 140-year-old floorboards to add warm percussion to Snider’s acoustic guitar. A community was thus born, where the dividing line between entertainer and entertained is erased and everyone plays a role in making a good time for everyone else. 

Of his own accord, Snider opened with the pairing of “The Get Together” and “Is this Thing Working” and performed the rarely played “Doll Face,” in which a landfilled newspaper describes its salad days as a tree to a dismembered toy. 

The humor extended to the banter. And on nights like this, Snider is as funny as any working comedian with stories about disastrous shows played to line-dancing fans of Shania Twain and Garth Brooks and his encounter with a 19-year-old Lil Wayne throwing money around at a party that attracted the cops and earned Snider the nickname “Rolling Paper.”

“I still think about that,” he said with a chuckle. 

And Snider fans will be thinking about this show for a similarly long time.