Todd Snider: 1966 - 2025
A Long Year
(I wrote this last week, but wanted to get permission from my friend to share it)
One of my college roommates may be the biggest feeler I have ever known. It should be no surprise then that Chase introduced me to the music of Todd Snider. When Todd Snider died tragically this year at age 59, I texted Chase. His reply, “I’m just devastated.” Simple and similar to his text when John Prine died “during covid1” (as we say now).
I think about Todd Snider lyrics all the time, even when I am not listening to him regularly. And every year for the past 25 years on December 31st, I think about his song “Long Year” from his album Happy to Be Here. The song is about someone relapsing during a battle against alcoholism. The topic is not why it comes to mind. It is the way that Snider sings the song. Honest, chilling, dare I say sobering.
“It’s been a lonnnnggg, lonnnnnng, year. How did I get here?”
His voice strains and cracks in a way that lets listeners sing a long without regard for our own pitch or timbre. To sing along without a quake or quiver, a tremble in your own voice is almost impossible and its as if Snider invites it (even insists on it). Its therapy for anyone who has had a long, long year, or needs to remember one.
Todd Snider was an artist who made you feel what he feels. And he clearly felt a lot.
Snider was also the first person that I encountered and thought, “I can imagine that he finds it very difficult to go through life without some kind of chemical calming agent.” I understood how someone could end up convinced that they needed to be on drugs. I am not endorsing that as a solution to life’s difficulties, I am just saying that I recognized in him someone who was carrying more than most of us.
Todd Snider fit the definition of an artist as “one who does not look away2”. His music made me uncomfortable and encouraged at the same time. I even included one of his songs on the soundtrack that played behind the slide show at our rehearsal dinner. That is about as high of praise as you can get from middle-class-white-people.
“Heeeeyyy, Baby, I ain’t afraid to be your man, I don’t need a destination, I ain’t waiting for a plan. Let’s get out of here, I’d go anywhere with you.” (“Anywhere” by Todd Snider)
Chase (my aforementioned roommate and Snider evangelist) wrote CD3 reviews for The Daily Mississippian our college newspaper. When Todd Snider came to Oxford to play a solo show at Proud Larry’s, Chase got the opportunity to interview Snider for a few minutes before the show and to chat with him very briefly afterward.
“Chase Farmer,” he said upon introduction, “man that is an awesome name, Chassse Faaarmerr.”
During the brief interview Chase asked Snider about his songs called “Crossroads” and “Somebody’s coming.” These were two of Snider’s songs that suggest that he knew that he (and all of us) ultimately needed not just something but someone to bear our burdens. He asked Snider if he planned on playing either of them. He confessed that they were not in his set list. (I can’t imagine that Snider ever had much of a “set list”). Later during the show, he did play “Somebody’s Comin’” and dedicated it to Chase.
A number of years later Chase and his wife got tickets to see Snider in Birmingham, Alabama. This would be Chase’s first time to see Snider live since college. As Snider walked off the stage during an intermission he made eye contact with Chase for the first time and casually says. “Oh, hey, Chase”
My friend looked at his wife to make sure that he had heard what he thought he had heard. “Did he just say my name?” Shelley confirmed it. Most people would not remember that interview let alone the name and apparently the face of the overanxious Southern Baptist kid who fumbled through questions while he wondered if Snider was high or just about to be.
Todd Snider famously told stories of receiving random phone calls from singer song writer Jerry Jeff Walker. The great gonzo himself called because he needed Snider to remind him of lyrics to his own songs!
Todd Snider had a lot on his mind. He had a lot in his mind. He had a lot in his soul that spilled out in his unforgettable music and stories. He refused to look away, and seemingly refused to forget. It was no doubt a curse that became a blessing to so many.
I listened to the album Happy to Be Here many times “during covid.” It was eerily prophetic in so many different ways.
“An artist is someone who doesn’t look away” is an often-cited, principle attributed to Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa from his 1990 Oscar acceptance speech.
Those are shiny discs that contained music after vinyl records and before the cloud.