Todd Snider may have, of late, been garage rocking and singing in Hard Working Americans, the band made up of members of Widespread Panic and the Chris Robinson Brotherhood.
But he’s always remained a folk singer at heart. That’s evident in his new album, recorded in Johnny Cash’s Tennessee cabin, Cash Cabin Songs Vol. 3 — there are no volumes one or two.
“I even have a talking blues song on this record,” he says in a recent phone interview. “I’ve always thought of myself as a folk singer. That’s never changed, even in the band. I wasn’t playing guitar or anything. I was just the singer.”
Snider’s folk lineage goes back to his earliest influences, including Jerry Jeff Walker who he saw playing in an Austin club and helped Snider realize he didn’t need a band to be a musician.
“John Prine was probably my first one, back in the ‘80s,” Snider says. “Then there was Jerry Jeff Walker and Guy Clark. There was that bunch of Townes Van Zandt people, Steve Earle was young then, Lyle Lovett was young then. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott is probably the father of what I do. It feels like this is a family I ended up joining.”
Snider made his name and wiseguy reputation within that folk family with the topical, tongue-in-cheek hit “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues,” and the wryly funny, autobiographical, “Alright Guy” on his 1994 debut album Songs for the Daily Planet.
He’s now got 19 albums that include 2012’s tribute album Time as We Know It: The Songs of Jerry Jeff Walker and his original-filled Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables that landed on many best-of-the-year lists and got him praised by Rolling Stone as “one of the sharpest, funniest storytellers in rock.”
Then came his two-album foray with Hard Working Americans and his 2016 garage rock excursion, Eastside Bulldog.
So why go back to folk?
“It’s just the songs, I think,” he says. “A lot of it was I’d been playing with the band and learning so much about guitar, even though I wasn’t playing guitar. When these songs came, the closer I got to finishing them, the more they seemed folkie. I recorded them with the band and they just sounded folkie.”
But, he says, it’s better folk than he could have played before getting schooled in Hard Working Americans.
“I’ve gotten a lot better at guitar,” Snider says. “I’ve finally got an ability to play not just chords and strum. I wouldn’t say it’s great guitar playing, but it’s good for me.”
The lyrics on Cash Cabin Vol. 3 are as incisive and entertaining as any that Snider has written, telling a he-swears-it’s-true story of Loretta Lynn dancing with “The Ghost of Johnny Cash,” detailing the songwriter’s life on “Working On A Song,” and, on “Talking Reality Television Blues,” taking a tour through television from Milton Berle to Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, from MTV’s The Real World to The Apprentice and the line “an old man with a comb-over had sold us the moon.”
That song comes right out of the folk tradition, from Woody Guthrie through Bob Dylan, as do “A Timeless Response to Current Events” and “The Blues on Banjo,” pointedly topical songs that Snider says aren’t aimed at convincing anyone of anything.
“I definitely don’t think that learning to play guitar makes your opinion better than someone else’s,” he says. “It does give you a place to put them. For me, a lot of it has always been getting it off your chest. It lets me get it off my chest.”
For most of the rest of 2019, Snider will be getting things off his chest in clubs and theaters across the country on a solo tour that’s literally solo.
That me-and-my-guitar approach makes for a, shall we say, loose show. Snider will try to work in some of the new songs, but most of the night will be “whatever somebody yells for.
“I usually try to go back and hit something from all the records. But I’ve got too many records now to guarantee I’ll hit all of them,” Snider says. “So a lot of it is what people yell for. I don’t have a collective ‘Free Bird.’ The songs they yell out come from all over the place. “BEER RUN” is probably the closest. But I don’t do it every night unless someone calls for it.”
And he’ll be happy that he’s able to play the show. Snider suffers from arthritis in his neck and back — he was hurting when we talked — but there’s no way he’s not going to go out and play for people.
“Some nights it hurts, but I wouldn’t know what I could do without touring,” he says. “I’m grateful for every show I get to do now. I don’t take it for granted. Some days the show is the only thing that gets the pain away. You’re running on adrenaline for those two or three hours around the show and the pain goes (away). I’ve had other musicians, like Willie Nelson, tell me that the show is the most healthy three hours of the day.”
ON THE BILL: Todd Snider — with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 10, Boulder Theater, 2032 14th St., Boulder, bouldertheater.com. Tickets are $25-$35.
