For an inordinate amount of time, there was only Bob Dylan. I got to college and “only Bob Dylan” was a side-eye at best or unimaginative ridicule at worst. I can’t complain.
Some ten years later, there was only Todd Snider. You can fathom the gap that got jumped between the two, but I made it across with angel’s wings or insights less from the heavens. It made for eccentric and bawdy tales along the path, late nights, and great music on records or downloads or CDs: John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker, Donnie Fritts, Billy Joe Shaver, Guy Clark, deeper dives into Townes, and from Snider’s very mouth, a recommendation to listen to the Kings of Leon before they’d even release their first album.
I followed Todd. Like, I followed Todd. “Stalked” would imply I had any sense or a sure-fire plan or an idea on what to do if I caught him.
He was a religion. He occupied a place in my life that was missing at the time, and sometimes still is. I filled that hole with Todd Snider’s music and wit and personality and dead-eye stare and stoner comebacks and wry look at the world and stories and lyrical genius.
Before I’d ever owned one of his CDs, I went on a whim, all alone in the beautiful pre-cell-phone era to watch him play Birmingham’s WorkPlay Theater. You know the rest.
Todd Snider tells stories. Literally. He tells them as he sings, like all great artists in music do, and now you’ll think those greats I mentioned earlier but also of Springsteen and of Randy Newman and of Tom T. Hall, yes, but Todd did it differently. So differently than any of the others mentioned here or elsewhere. He would offer rambling, funny, bodacious, and embellished anecdotes in between many a song in his live shows, and he’d warn you of as much around the second or third song that he was liable to ramble, “sometimes as much as eighteen minutes in between the songs.” And in one of those rambles, he speaks the line, “Well, shit, I could do that.”
The night I first see him in Birmingham at WorkPlay Theater, about twenty minutes before he tells the very same story, I think, “Well, shit, I can do this.”
I studied him, listened to him, worshiped him, followed him, met him, watched him, talked to him, smoked two joints with him, sat beside his road manager while he scarfed down wings, rambled to Todd as he graciously let me incoherently detail what his next series of albums should be. I dressed like him and tried my damnest to perform like him. I put a lot of effort into trying to play like Todd. It was almost exhausting except that it wasn’t.
A couple of years after that whirlwind of education, I got a band up and running by no fault of my own. My thoughts swirled more miles per minute than ever before in joyous glory, and then, somewhere, some exact second, I let Todd Snider go. Whoosh.
It was not long after his 2006 release of The Devil You Know where I would certainly catch him when he played in town, particularly if the ticket was free, but I’d not be the guy to buy two nights worth of shows in Indianapolis only to back out of going because of a snow storm.
The tickets were only $11 per night. I survived and saw him two weeks later in Nashville over Easter weekend in two nights at the Belcourt Theater, there introduced to Peter Cooper (a dick) and Hayes Carll (really great). After those first night of shows, I walk to the bar next door, the only joint open around, and Hayes and his small entourage are there. I’d just bought his t-shirt, fell for his songs, so I said hello. He was kind. I let him and his friends be after a quick comment of happiness his set brought to me.
Then in 2007, everything completely stopped. For the guy I’d ripped off far more than Bob Dylan ever did with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, I figured I was done with Todd Snider. I shut the door. I’d crack it, or press my ear to the wood, if he had something new, but I’d usually mumble, “He’s lost it,” or sadly shake my head as I stared at the floor or question if he was fighting addiction again, a sad and well established aspect of his life. I’d shrug. I’d say he’s not for me. Not any more. I took what I needed and I had left. Todd’s burned out. And he was looking rough. He wasn’t the Todd I thought I knew.
I was really too ashamed to say how much I tried to be him.
I was lauded when I’d play “Conservative Christian, Right-Wing Republican, Straight, White, American Males.” People would always clap me on the back for playing “Beer Run” at their parties, whether they knew its origins or not. They’d laugh as I’d try a shorter version of a tall Todd tale based on my own, wild, irredeemable life. I soaked in the praise and never uttered Todd Snider’s name, not one time. Stealing. Thievery. Lying.
I’d morph his “East Nashville Skyline” into something you would call a song uniquely titled “Tuscaloosa Skyline,” which wasn’t worth the time it took to play it, but folks liked their names said aloud in that damn version. Acknowledging your peers, those who came before you, are important rites. But I’d not tell many more outside of my own band that I’d taken the whole cloth from Snider. Same chord structure, same harmony, same melody, only with Tuscaloosa bands listed in order I knew them. See, I’d only changed the words. Weird Al will back me: that’s an easy game to win.
Yet now I know it wasn’t that I was doing some version of Todd Snider and then turning away from that persona and musician.
Everything was Todd Snider.
From the moment I first put my name on a sign-up sheet for a university theater’s wild outing of skits and songs to being introduced to fellow musicians via that same University of Alabama’s theater to playing a songwriting night every single Tuesday of my life for three straight years to waking up every Wednesday after those Tuesday nights with a hangover to forming and joining and quitting variations of all the same ol’ rowdy and sorta country and sorta rock and fully shitty bands. All of that was me doing my own Todd Snider.
Even the bits in between: visiting, moving, stopping music altogether, re-launching a website, starting a podcast, enjoying old friends, teaching, writing a newsletter, laughing, sharing stories of others or myself. All of that, too, was me doing Todd Snider, if I did it worth a shit. Or if you enjoyed it. Or if it made you mad and you still sort of chuckle about it. Maybe you thought what I did, what I said was downright awful, yet that’s the memory you keep and you sometimes laugh and shake your head over it all? It was me. Me, doing my best Todd Snider.
It’s strange to write a tribute for a big brother because I have a big brother in reality, ten years older than I am, same as Todd Snider’s age, the untouchable big brother of us all.
Once, I took my actual brother, again on a whim, to see a Todd Snider show at Crossroads in Huntsville. He couldn’t get over that Snider walked right down the middle aisle that we did a few minutes earlier for our seats except he did it to climb the stage, barefoot, and play the show. I believe my actual brother leaned in, and asked, “Is he barefoot?” more than once.
As audience members, my drunken roommate and I once reigned a Todd Snider concert like a gentle mule who barely needed a push or pull to be told what to do. This was at The Library in Tuscaloosa, and to be fair, Snider asked if the crowd had any requests. We did. We all did. We dug deep, too. Hard to say if those five songs in a row we wanted to hear were a pleasure for him to play or a series of confusions or pure pains in the ass of quasi-hecklers, which we really didn’t want to be, but playback of the recorded show proves were were assholes at best. Play a train song!
It would construct a fence around his work to say that experiencing his live shows was akin to getting a ticket to a great-stand up comic and a great folk/rock artist and a rockling concert and a magical hang with some friends.
He reframed how to look at life: oh you saw it this way? I saw it this way. That’s how the song came to be.
There is embellishment but there’s also truth, a truth of poignancy. Here’s how he saw the thing, here’s how we saw the thing, here’s the hilarity of those two points of view converging now, yet here’s the melancholy that holds it altogether.
No one did it like Todd Snider. Not John Prine. Not Hayes Carll. Not Jimmy Buffett. Jerry Jeff Walker was close, but that just makes sense. Peter Cooper never sniffed the same air.
And I damn sure didn’t.
Todd was a man who never seemed entirely comfortable in his own skin, no matter who surrounded him or the circumstance he was in. Even in video recordings of Todd at home, he looked of a man with an itch that never could be scratched.
There is more than a tinge of sadness to each of his most funny song lines. “I Can’t Complain” lands each verse with its narrator not complaining about a low-wage fast food job, not bitching about an inability to do more than gripe, and yet finally selling out to whatever the amount of money on the table is at the moment for better or worse. You live in the moment.
There’s so much melancholic humor at the notion of the dude, much like ourselves, who’s been though “seven managers, five labels,/A thousand picks and patch cables,/Three vans, a band, a buncha guitar stands,/And cans and cans and cans of beer,/And bottles of booze,/And bags of pot,/And a thousand other things I’d forgot” but do we all tag that extra two lines at the end the song? “I thought that I’d be dead by now./But I’m not”?
But I’m not.
Still, there’s only Todd Snider.
Only Todd Snider.
Todd Snider passed away from pneumonia on Friday, November 14, 2025 shortly after releasing his album HIGH, LONESOME, AND THEN SOME. on his label Aimless Records.
