From “Alright Guy” and “Play a Train Song” to his rollicking “Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues”
In his own shambolic way, Todd Snider was a master songwriter — a follower of John Prine and Jerry Jeff Walker who specialized in sharp, often hilarious, story-songs about all manner of down-and-out characters, himself very much included. Over more than 30 years, Snider wrote about everything from the Kingsmen to pitcher Dock Ellis’ acid-aided no-hitter, always with empathy, self-awareness, and a winning stoner drawl. (Some of his best moments were not even songs — see the long, rambling, funny-as-hell monologues he’d tell onstage.) Here are 12 highlights.
‘Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues’
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A minor hit in 1994, this talking blues is an early example of Snider’s humor, which was by turns stoner-friendly and biting. Snider satirizes the commercialization of alternative rock with a rollicking song about a struggling band that relocates to the Northwest and discovers a novel trick: refusing to play at all. (Or, as Snider puts it, “silence: music’s original alternative.”) In the song, the band blows up, gets rich and even lands a spot on MTV Unplugged: “We went right out there and refused to do acoustical versions/Of the electrical songs we had refused to record in the first place/Then we smashed our shit.” —Christian Hoard
‘Alright Guy’
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One of Snider’s catchiest, most radio-friendly songs, “Alright Guy” found the innate troublemaker owning up to his proclivities. He liked to look at nude pics of Madonna, enjoyed his weed, and wasn’t averse to mouthing off at the police. But, hey, that was nothing, Snider countered. “I know I get wild and I know I get drunk/but it ain’t like I got a bunch of bodies in my trunk,” he sang. “I think I’m an alright guy.” The country singer Gary Allan recorded his own version of the song in 2001 and even titled his album after it, but not before tweaking one of Snider’s punchiest lyrics about “tearing up pictures of the Pope.” —Joseph Hudak
‘Can’t Complain’
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Snider turned an awful early gig in Phoenix (“A little out of place/A little out of tune,” the song begins) into one of his most beautiful meditations. The song, as much as any other, exemplifies the Tao of Todd, a mix of stoner mishap, zen acceptance, radical gratitude, and dry humor: “We’re all waiting in the dugout wishin’ we could pitch,” Snider sings, “How you gonna throw a shutout, if all you do is bitch?” — Jon Bernstein
‘Long Year’
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Rarely did Snider get more vulnerable, and more honest, than he did on this haunting portrait of addiction from 2000’s Happy to Be Here. The best versions are live, just Todd by himself on guitar, with Todd telling the story that begins with a man trying — and struggling — to engage with twelve-step recovery and ends with him taking a shot of liquor. It’s always been a devastating portrait of isolation and the pain of recovery; Snider conjures worlds of emotion in his plainspoken tale of feeling alienated from the others in recovery: “Everyone was telling everyone how they felt,” Snider sings. “It felt like so long since I’d been young.” —J.B.
‘Beer Run’
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This well-turned story-song focuses on two kids with fake IDs who run afoul of a store clerk in the pursuit of cold ones, but find redemption (and brews) in time to see a Robert Earl Keen show in Santa Cruz. The song is catchy-as-hell and all good vibes, right down to the “B-double-E-double-R-U-N” chorus. A prime example of the hippie bonhomie that Snider gravitated toward in his lighter moments, not to mention one of the great beer songs ever. —C.H.
‘Play a Train Song’
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Snider’s tribute to East Nashville’s fast living unofficial mayor Skip Litz soon became his signature song. It’s trademark Todd, full of pathos, hillbilly humor, and raise-your-beer melodicism. Rarely did Snider play a show without performing this one, which, of course, was as much about himself as it was Litz (to hammer that home, Snider switches from first-person to third-person at times). “I was depressed because my friend had died,” Snider writes of the song in his memoir. “And my depression started to rhyme.” —J.B.
‘Conservative Christian, Right-Wing Republican, Straight, White, American Males’
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Todd Snider didn’t mince words, and he left nothing to the imagination in this wild ride off 2004’s East Nashville Skyline that compared and contrasted two political ideologies. While the song is an indictment of the type of person spelled out in its lengthy title — dudes who are likely “gay bashin’, Black-fearin’, poor-fightin’, tree-killin’ regional leaders of sales” — it’s also a celebration of the community in which Snider counted himself. The hippies, Todd suggested, had it right all along, with their “tree-huggin’, love-makin’, pro-choicin’, gay weddin’” beliefs. Twenty-one years since Snider released the tune, it still resonates today across America’s great divide. —J.H.
‘You Got Away With It (A Tale of Two Fraternity Brothers)’
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There were few more pointed critiques of George W. Bush than this account, inspired in part by Snider’s attempt to crash rugby parties he wasn’t invited to in his youth in San Marcos, Texas, of a rich unaccountable young college student wreaking havoc on campus who’d later become the President of the Free World. The song was released in 2006, at the height of the Iraq War, and though the song never mentioned the current president by name, it ends with a sharp jab: “You’ll get away with this new thing, too.” —J.B.
‘The Devil You Know’
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Snider tells a harrowing story-song of an armed bank-robber on the run and making a detour at the narrator’s house in Nashville. The music is intense — more rocking and harder-edged than almost anything else in Snider’s catalog — and the narrative keeps you on the edge of your seat, as the singer tosses the crook his car keys and helps him get away. But it’s not just a story; it’s a musing on systemic poverty, culminating in one of the more definitive political statements of Snider’s career: “There’s a war going on that the poor can’t win.” —C.H.
‘Just Like Old Times’
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The story starts dodgy and gets dodgier: “There’s a Coke machine glowing through the parking lot/Call it a room with a view.” From there, Snider’s protagonist reunites with a sex worker he knew from growing up before they both get hassled by the police. So much happens in Snider’s perfect, three-verse country song that it ended up becoming the basis for a 2020 feature film starring RZA. “I say the guy’s a pool hustler, but it’s just me,” Snider said in 2019. “I was just sick of singing about guys with guitars, so I gave him a pool cue.” —J.B.
‘Greencastle Blues’
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Snider was nothing if not self-aware about his shortcomings, and in this 2009 song, he takes stock of chronic fuckups with wry honesty. It was inspired by a true story: Snider got picked up for weed possession in Greencastle, Indiana, and found himself wondering why a man in his forties should keep ending up like this. The lyrics are sweetly funny, while also asking questions that point toward something darker. “Some of this trouble just finds me,” Snider sings. “Most of this trouble I earn/ How do you know when it’s too late? How do you know when it’s too late? How do you know when it’s too late to learn?” —C.H.
‘Working on a Song’
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Snider stripped down his sound for 2019’s Cash Cabin Sessions: Vol. 3, a record of mostly solo acoustic songs recorded at Johnny Cash’s cabin studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, the Nashville suburb where Snider would eventually move later in his life. He revisited his gift for humorous talking blues on the track “Talking Reality Television Blues,” but it’s “Working on a Song” that revealed the magic of his songwriting. It’s a gorgeous ditty about chasing the muse, in which he chronicles his failure to finish a song, all in the midst of singing a great one. It ends with a very Snider question: “Where will I go now that I’m gone?” —J.H.