Todd Snider, Runaway Locomotive, R.I.P.

Make 'em Leave My Boots On, On The Day They Lay Me Down

I talked to Todd Snider for the last time in January. It was almost 20 years after our first conversation, back when I was a general assignment reporter for my hometown newspaper in Wisconsin. In both cases, I don’t think my editors were all that keen on another Todd Snider interview. A Todd Snider interview was not going to move the needle, either in terms of traffic or however we measured “moving the needle” in the days of daily newspapers. He wasn’t exactly “a name.” He was just a folk singer of nominal notoriety. But I did it anyway. Because I loved the guy’s music. And I loved interviewing him. Of the hundreds (maybe thousands?) of musicians I’ve encountered in the span of time between those Todd Snider interviews, he is in the top five of most entertaining talkers. Maybe top two. Maybe even No. 1. He could speak, hilariously, on any number of topics: Touring, politics, drugs, his various one-night jail stints, Jerry Jeff Walker, the Rolling Stones, all the most crucial subjects. Though you didn’t have to do a phoner with him to know that. You could discern it from seeing Todd Snider in concert or listening to one of his many live records. I like to say (this was my elevator pitch for the guy) that listening to Todd Snider is like getting John Prine and Mitch Hedberg in one package. An incredible bargain when you think about it. Though not nearly enough people took him up on it.

That’s why I was eager to talk to him again. This was, I think, our fourth and fifth interview, though the first in many years, since the early 2010s. I wanted to revisit the wise-ass hippie dude I remembered, loved, and revered. At least that’s what I told myself. But, deep down, I knew the real reason why I felt the need to check in, and maybe give the guy a publicity boost and even a pep talk.

I didn’t dare say it out loud, but I feared that he might not live much longer.

Alas, here we are: Snider’s Facebook page confirmed that he passed away Friday November 14 after reportedly being diagnosed with pneumonia. He was 59.

I don’t want to get into the circumstances of his final days and weeks except to say that it sounds like the plot of a Todd Snider song. A shaggy-dog tune about an outsider cast into the lower rungs of America, the depths of which most of us don’t want to witness or acknowledge, where human beings suffer from lack of empathy and wanton neglect and spiraling addiction and poor health care and the profound alienation and desolation such things engender. A deeply sad story that he would have found a way to make funny.

I can almost see it from Todd Snider’s perspective, the pathetic spectacle of media outlets that never would have deigned to consider a person like Todd Snider “important,” all of a sudden rushing to post body cam footage of his prolonged physical and mental breakdown on their rapidly marginalized and eternally shitty websites. When you think about it as a metaphor for a debased culture, where a great unheralded songwriter can only become famous when he’s viewed as trainwreck grist for the algorithm, it does have the ring of bleak satiric irony that Todd would have appreciated. Had he lived longer, he might have gotten around to writing “I Saw Todd Snider On TMZ” for his next record.

What’s really sad is that the way Todd lived is way more interesting than how he died. As a songwriter, he was always good, often great, and occasionally brilliant. And he was a genuine character. As I wrote earlier this year, you can “throw a rock in Nashville and … hit an earnest singer-songwriter who claims to be influenced by the country-folk greats of the 1970s: John Prine, Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver, etc. But almost nobody feels like they could have come out of the 1970s.” Todd was the exception. It was, in the end, his blessing and his curse.

I came on board with 2004’s East Nashville Skyline. Todd liked that one, too. It’s where he finally figured out how to make folk music that sounded like a muddy and messy cross of Exile On Main St. and Ragged Glory, which was his ultimate artistic ambition, I think. He made it after he crashed out of a semi-promising major-label career, almost died, and ended up on Prine’s record label. In our last interview, he spoke with obvious pride about how the album impressed his label head and role model. “He talked to me different after that, from that day forward,” Todd told me. “And it wasn’t like it was a success. It was just like, ‘That’s kind of original and honest and heartfelt and no crap in there.’”

I was sort of aware of Todd Snider before that. I wrote for my paper’s entertainment section, so I would see his name pop up at least once per year (sometimes multiple times) in our weekly show listings. I had him pegged as a mid-level grinder, “the B-singer who plays your bar,” as Todd himself put it in our first interview. There were lots of guys like that back then, plugging away in countless Middle American venues you’ve never heard of, the quasi-fancy sports bars and unquestionably low-rent theaters of show business’ middling middle. He was, at the time — and perhaps even now — best known for novelty songs like “Beer Run” and “Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues,” which I subsequently learned were both great in their own ways but 27-year-old me wasn’t hip to at all.

The first song that grabbed me was the second track on East Nashville Skyline. “Tillamook County Jail” is about a guy who fucked up and got in some kind of altercation while working on a highway crew. Though we don’t learn that until the third verse. In the first verse, the guy is worried that his girl won’t bail him out. In the second verse, he talks about getting beaten up by the cops. But he makes it funny. “Got a lump on my head and a boot print on my chest / From what the guys in here call the Tillamook County lie detector test / Well I did my best but as you mighta guessed / It’s a tough test not to fail / I’m sitting here waiting in the Tillamook County Jail.”

The guy in “Tillamook County Jail” is a quintessential Todd Snider protagonist. An unreliable narrator, sure, but also just plain old unreliable and, more than that, undesirable. Later on East Nashville Skyline, he writes from the perspective of a lackey in Mike Tyson’s entourage, the one who washes “every car in this 10-car garage.” Most songwriters, who are inclined to approach such seedy subject matter, would have just focused on Mike and the many Shakespearean turns of his epic and tragic life. But Todd was drawn to the nothing guy on Mike’s periphery. That was his M.O. It’s like how in one his greatest songs, 2006’s “The Highland Street Incident,” Todd writes about this time he was robbed in real life, only he does it from the robber’s point of view. “I never had any empathy for the folk singer on his break who got robbed,” he told me later. “I had more sympathy for the guy that was addicted to crack. I feel like I’m definitely drawn to the Tonya Harding in the Nancy Kerrigan story, you know?”

By the third track on East Nashville Skyline, I was a lifelong fan. If you press me, “Play A Train Song” is my favorite Todd Snider song. Though a lot of other songs are tied. Definitely “Tillamook County Jail” and “The Highland Street Incident” and “Iron Mike’s Main Man’s Last Request.” Gotta put these ones up there, too: “Thin Wild Mercury,” “I Can’t Complain,” “Brenda,” “Greencastle Blues,” “DB Cooper,” “New York Banker,” “The Devil You Know,” “Tension,” “Lonely Girl,” “Is This Thing On?”, “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” his cover of Fred Eaglesmith’s “Alcohol And Pills,” and “Looking For A Job.” There are others I’ll be mad later that I didn’t mention.

But “Play A Train Song” is the Todd Snider song. The one that feels like a mission statement for this life and an epitaph now. The chorus is perfect.

Play a train song, pour me one more round
Make ‘em leave my boots on, on the day they lay me down
I’m a runaway locomotive out of my one track mind
And I’m a-lookin’ for any kinda trouble that I can find

There’s a lot of self-mythology in those lines. And plenty of autobiography, too. Though I initially cared more about the former than the latter. I saw him live as often as I could after that, and he was (for a while) consistently great. The best times were when he was by himself, with his guitar slung low and his feet bare, and an endless supply of comically meandering stories that may or may not have been true sandwiched between each tune.

For the next several records, I found an excuse to talk to him, and I talked editors into publishing what I wrote. One time, in 2012, I interviewed him as he stood outside of an all-night poker game in East Nashville. “I left last night,” he explained. “I didn’t do too good, and when I drove by this morning and saw everybody was still here, I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’ll dive back in so I can get my money back.’”

The following year, I saw him play in Milwaukee with Jason Isbell. At the time, Todd was, by default, the one who was ascendant. His 2009 record, The Excitement Plan, was made with Don Was, the producer of Voodoo Lounge, a bit of trivia only Stones freaks like me and Todd Snider care about. It was the closest he came to maybe kinda sorta becoming a mainstream proposition. Isbell, meanwhile, had been flushed out of Drive-By Truckers and for years played sloppy shows as a notorious drunk. Though at this gig, it was apparent he had cleaned up his act and was now playing with clarity, precision, and professionalism. It was about six weeks before Southeastern came out. He had figured it out. He was on his way.

I’m not going to do the thing people like me do with people like Todd Snider when they die. Where you talk about how “real” they were, and how that realness kept them from being successful. Todd, I believe, knew what it took to become Jason Isbell. In 2014, he published a wonderful book called I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like: Mostly True Tall Tales, and there’s a part I think about all the time where he writes about how to make it as a songwriter. Though I think it applies to anyone who tries to carve out a living doing anything creative:

“You are not trying to be liked. You are trying to be judged, as often as you can, so you can keep your refrigerator full.”

What he means is that you have to put yourself out there, constantly, and not worry about the reaction. Even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts. Because putting yourself in as many situations as possible where someone can have an opinion about you is the only way for anyone to have a good opinion about you. I think Todd tried to do that, in his own way, but he also seemed fundamentally wired to not judge anybody, including himself. And that must have hamstrung his ambition in some crucial way. It’s hard to move your career forward when you’re trying to balance promoting your record with hanging out at an all-night poker game in East Nashville.

The same year the book came out, I saw the first Todd Snider gig I didn’t enjoy. It was at some weird ballroom in Green Bay, the kind of place you book for a wedding reception when the bride and groom have already been married at least once and don’t want to spend all that much on the sequel. It’s the first time I remember feeling worried about his health. He was seated instead of standing, clearly uncomfortable, and he looked a little too skinny. I heard he was recently divorced. I consoled myself by thinking about “Age Like Wine,” the self-deprecating opener from East Nashville Skyline, where he tells the listener, “My new stuff is nothing like my old stuff was / And neither one is much when compared to the show / Which will not be as good as some other one you saw.” Maybe I was just being that same complaining fan fixated on half-remembered gigs from years ago. As for my health concerns, well, Todd always found a way to make it through, right? After all, like he says at the end of the song, “I thought that I’d be dead by now / But I’m not.”

He lived, it turns out, another 11 years. But those years seemed trying. In the 2020s, he lost so many friends and heroes: Prine, Kristofferson, Walker, Jimmy Buffett, his songwriting partner Peter Cooper, and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Richard Lewis, whom he considered his very best friend. There were trips in and out of rehab, and a devastating back condition called stenosis that made his bones and back ache so bad he couldn’t tour for two years.

Despite everything, though, he was upbeat when we spoke that last time. Or he tried to be upbeat, anyway. He was determined to get back on the road and make another record. (High, Lonesome, And Then Some came out last month.) He talked about becoming “one of them ‘stretching all the time and meditating’ people,” as an alternative to his regular lifestyle. “I’m not 60 yet, and I love drugs. I always loved drugs, but I don’t want to have to take them,” he said. “I love pain pills when I don’t need them.”

At the end of the interview, which went on for over an hour and almost ended at least three times before Todd picked up a new conversational thread, we ended up talking about (of all things) the Jimi Hendrix Live In Maui album. If you haven’t heard it: It’s Jimi playing in Hawaii in 1970, about two months before he died, for an audience of incredibly stoned hippies sitting crosslegged in a big open field. On the video, it looks like Jimi is already in heaven.

We both loved that record. And Todd had a theory about it. He told his buddy Richard Lewis about it before Richard died. “These are rich hippies he does not give a fuck about,” he insisted. “This is almost like a rehearsal for these guys. But for that reason, they’re playing amazing.”

Todd, wherever you are, I hope you are confirming this with Jimi right now.