After a stint with jam bands, Todd Snider the troubadour is back
Todd Snider/Aaron Lee Tasjan
8 p.m. Nov. 30 at Manchester Music Hall. 899 Manchester St. $27.50, $29.50. 859-537-7321. manchestermusichall.com, toddsnider.net.
When he paraded onstage two years ago at Masterson Station Park for the now-defunct Moontower Music Festival, a very different Todd Snider was in performance. This wasn’t the whimsical, offbeat folkie whose solo acoustic shows made the Tennessee songsmith a favorite of local audiences for over two decades. This was an electric entertainer fronting a garage rock troupe of musical rogues clearly relishing the party atmosphere.
The band in question was dubbed the East Nashville Bulldogs, one of two ensembles Snider dabbles in, the other being the more jam-oriented Hard Working Americans. But for a Thanksgiving weekend performance at Manchester Music Hall, Snider will be without a guest list. The concert will focus on a guitar, a satchel full of sometimes sardonic, sometimes devastating songs and a realization that playing on his own will always be his most natural performance setting.
“For me, I feel like my life’s work is the solo show, trying to do the whole troubadour, Son of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott thing (referencing the folk pioneer). To me, that’s my life’s work.
“The other things I do, like the Bulldog thing, I did those because I was really burned out, especially on poetry and lyrics. That had been what I had aspired to and worked hard at for a couple of decades. I just wanted to take a break from it. I was craving to get out and just sing ‘baby, baby, baby.’ The Bulldogs never rehearsed. When we got the jam band, though, things got real.
“Both of the bands felt like opportunities to learn about songwriting, about a different style and about different things about songs that aren’t folk. In both of those instances, I feel like I brought something back to my day job. Both of those projects I would still like to continue to do. We’ll do the jam band again. That thing was pretty sacred. That was a real band. Some of those songs were pretty good, too. The Bulldogs’ songs were songs for a garage band.
“With those bands, I felt like I was taking a busman’s holiday. But I took whatever I learned from that back with me.”
Where that led was to Snider’s newest album, “Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3.” The project steered him away from his recent electric adventures by re-routing him to the famed recording studio of country legend Johnny Cash that gives the project its title. The largely solo recording (Americana all-star couple Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires cameo on harmonies) boasts a level of aloofness that begins with the album title suffix (there is, so far, no Vol. 1 or 2). From there, though, the music reveals considerable thematic variety, from Dylan-esque joyrides (“Talking Reality Television Blues”) to meditations on country forefathers (“The Ghost of Johnny Cash,” “Cowboy Jack Clements’ Waltz”) to works of intense topical potency (“A Timeless Response to Current Events”).
Cash Cabin wasn’t exactly foreign territory for Snider. Studio owner John Carter Cash (the elder Cash’s son) invited the songsmith to visit in 2015 as another country giant, Loretta Lynn, cut two songs she co-wrote with Snider.
Initially, he took Hard Working Americans there to record (an album’s worth of material with the band was rumored to have been cut), but Snider was increasingly drawn back to his folk roots. By the fall of 2018, he returned to the studio and cut the material that became “Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3.”
“Before I got back out there, I started having these weird Johnny Cash dreams. That’s when I really started getting back into what it meant to be a troubadour because I had just gone through this whole thing where I didn’t like lyrics anymore. I was coming back around to Woody Guthrie a lot. I started singing about singing in this reflective way. It felt like there was this theme. These are songs about a singer who needs songs, if that makes sense. The whole record feels like it’s full of songs about a singer who is addicted to songs.”
If the recording was inspired by a cherished country forefather, Snider’s Thanksgiving weekend show here will reconnect him with an honored protégé. Opening will be pop/folk stylist Aaron Lee Tasjan, an artist many critics have viewed as following in Snider’s stylistic footsteps the same way Snider was long ago referenced by many (including Snider himself) as a folk disciple of John Prine.
“Aaron came to my house a few years ago, before he even started making records. I just knew right way that I had met someone I was going to be friends with. I believe every word that kid sings, and that makes me happy. He’s kind of the leader of the East Nashville scene right now. I can’t go on enough about that kid.
“He’s family in that I feel an obligation to him, to look out after him if he ever needed something. I doubt he ever will. He was in the Bulldogs, too. I remember the first song I heard him play and I thought, ‘Daaaamn, man.’ Ever since then, I just followed Aaron and listened to the songs. It just made you feel he’s doing a masterful job of being a rapscallion sort of artist/troubadour.”
And what of Snider’s own ongoing rapscallion reputation?
“I’m enjoying it. I really enjoy being on the road this year. I’m still working on songs. I have a ton of them, so I’m now working on another record. I’ll go through spells where I’m less involved than I am now. I’ve had to do weird things to keep myself going. With both bands and the solo thing, chasing the muse get a little crazy, so it doesn’t always go where it’s supposed to. But I’m happy. I feel really grateful that I still get to be the singer.”
This story was originally published November 26, 2019 at 2:39 PM.