A Conversation with Todd Snider – HuffPost 12.29.11

Mike Ragogna: Hello there, Todd.

Todd Snider: Hey Mike, nice to be talking with you.

MR: Same here. We were in touch years ago when Universal reissued and put together a couple of albums that you’d worked on, one being a “best of” for the Hip-O imprint.

TS: Oh yeah, did you know Bob Mercer then?

MR: Yeah, the late Bob Mercer. What an awesome guy. One of the greats.

TS: That makes me happy to talk to someone who knew him. He was like my dad, I miss him so much. He was very much like my father. When I was finding out I was getting married I called him. Good guy, crazy guy though.

MR: (laughs) He so understood the business and yet was amazingly artist-friendly. He was great to hang with as well.

TS: Yeah, me and that guy have done some late nights together that’s for sure.

MR: And he is a big part of the Todd Snider story. You guys go back to when you both were with the Margaritaville label, the Coral Reefer days. Let’s get into that.

TS: I was like 26 and I was playing a bar in Memphis, and there were big crowds until record companies started showing up. There was a bunch of them at the time, and everybody had all of these ideas for me. Bob came into my life and saw a show. They would all say, “We want you to be on the label” and “We want you to do this.” I said, “Well what about what I just did, what about the thing that made you want to come back here and talk to me?” He was the only person that came at it in the way where he said, “I don’t want you to do anything, I want you to take my money and do whatever you want.” I thought I had won a contest or something. From that day he said, “Don’t worry about being on the radio. Make whatever kind of poems you want, record them how you want, and the rest will be everybody else’s problem.” He stuck by me my whole career. Every friend I have has a story of that record company that had an outfit they wanted him to wear or a sound they wanted him to have. I was really lucky that this guy thought I was funny or fun to get high with, and my whole career, he took care of me right up until last summer. Right now, I’m too old for anywhere to care what I do. But in those days, there could have been more pressure then there was. I felt like I almost had a Sopranos type character, because he was such a powerful guy in the music business. He was definitely doing stuff bigger than the folk thing that I was doing, which was almost the thing he did after work for fun. He just helped me for fun when he was done doing those billion-selling records. If I hadn’t have had that protector, I don’t know what would have happened, I probably would have ended up being sent home. I don’t know, thanks to him, we have this job.

MR: Yeah, we’re definitely in the Bob Mercer fan club.

TS: It’s like a family too, like me and you will probably know each other for the rest of our lives now. I can’t begin to think of all of the people I know, he never lost touch with anybody. He’s just a good guy, he was almost like a cult leader.

MR: When I spoke to Kate Bush and Roger Taylor about him–his mentoring both of them–Roger didn’t know he had passed away, so I was the one who broke the news to him. I kind of feel bad about that.

TS: Well, he was an amazing character, he was like a guy out of a movie. He was somehow always holding the wheel, nobody ever knocked him off his square. He was a partier, that’s how people mostly remember him. When you would be around Bob, people would say this is what music was like in the seventies, and I would think I’m staying here then.

MR: Beautiful. Todd, let’s talk about you for a while. Songs For The Daily Planet would be considered your debut right?

TS: Yeah, that’s the record Bob had me make. I was really young, and I had written like a hundred songs. But in my mind, I knew the thirteen I wanted to put on a record and I didn’t want anyone to tell me different. He was the only one who wouldn’t. That was a fun time in my life. It was mixed though, it came with some sadness and some struggles that you don’t see coming. All in all, it was a lot of fun, ’94 and ’95, first year on the road.

MR: You were 26 or so.

TS: Yeah, about twenty years ago.

MR: You’re also associated with The Coral Reefer Band, and you hung out with those guys too.

TS: Yeah, Jimmy Buffett is who Bob worked for at the time, and he took me under his wing and let me open for him and taught me some things and really helped me get started. I think he funded my first two albums. They did better then we thought they were going to, so I got moved over to MCA, but Bob stayed with me and Jimmy stayed with me. I still see Jimmy. I’m going to cut one of his songs and I can tell he’s strapped for cash. I think the thirty, sixty dollars I could make him could really help him get through. (laughs)

MR: (laughs) Jimmy Buffett has to be on Forbes‘ richest people list.

TS: He does really well, he’s both brains. I only have met two people I know that can be a poet and then turn on the other brain. Robert Earl Keen can do his own taxes too and just write a poem and switch. I can’t. I’ve got my money in a coffee can, then I got a record deal and gave it to a guy named Chuck or some s**t like that. He still takes care of it for me. (laughs)

MR: Okay, so coffee can aside, Todd Snider then moved on to Oh Boy, the John Prine-ish label. What was the move like, what was the history?

TS: We keep coming back up with Bob Mercer, but he always had his eye out for me, and I don’t know what he liked about me so much. He knew that John Prine was my hero. Right in the middle of the first couple records, we brought in John Prine’s management team. Jimmy was helping me make the records and John’s manager was helping me manage. Then our third album for MCA, I think they sold two of them, my mom bought one, and maybe my brother’s friend bought one.

MR: (laughs) Three. I bought one.

TS: (laughs) So, three people bought it. It didn’t do very well compared to what we spent on it, so we got fired. That was the only time I ever got fired in my life, but I wasn’t a jerk. When it happened, MCA didn’t say, “You’re fired,” they just said, “We can’t make your next record, we’ll help you figure out who’s going to do it.” So, it was a really smooth transition from one to the next, so it didn’t really come into my life. I was working on my records and being told don’t worry they’re going to come out. It’s only a couple of years ago that I got nostalgic. I turned 43 or something, and I started asking my manager stuff. I always tell him, “Just leave me alone, I don’t want to know, I don’t care. If my lights are on and my phone works, I’m good.”

MR: As long as that phone works, and it has internet, that’s all that matters.

TS: Yeah, right? I just found out recently, just from looking into it, even more than I knew at the time, that transition in my life kind of got made for me backstage by some people who really had better things to do with their time. I just feel really grateful. I always hear in the music game that people are really ruthless and that’s just been the opposite of my experience. I knock on wood. But that time in my life, I look back on really fondly because some of my heroes really stepped up and helped me. They always helped me work on my poems, but I didn’t realize how much they were helping me backstage until I was older.

MR: By the way, The Devil You Know was an amazing album, and it had that great song to Bush, “You Got Away With It (A Tale Of Two Fraternity Brothers.)”

TS: Yeah, I need to start playing that. I haven’t played that in so long. I’m really proud of that record. In fact, the team that worked on the record…I think we might have something fun going on. That was a cool time in my life. I had just made those three records for John Prine and I had been touring. In most peoples lives, if you hang around long enough, they will do a greatest hits record. Somehow, Bob saw that coming, and he called me up. A lot of people don’t get to control their greatest hits record but he made it so I could. Then we made that one more record and he passed away. I love my last two records and they did good, and I’ve listened to them and I don’t know if I like them as much as The Devil You Know. It feels a little chaotic trying to sort through the songs without him.

MR: You’re talking about Peace Queer, and The Excitement Plan?

TS: Yeah, I’m thinking that should have been one record, but hindsight’s 20/20. That was sort of one record that I decided I should split in half and make it into two. I wonder if I should have made one big one, especially if Bob had been around. After he passed away, I produced this record for a kid named Jason D. Williams, and it was just chaos to make. I remember in the middle of it thinking, “I need to keep my life like this, structure doesn’t help me.” Bob used to help me stay that way and I just thought, “Never again am I going to act like a grown up, I tried it for a few months and it doesn’t do me any good.” If I act like a ten year old, I tend to like the art that comes from it.

MR: But you had a number one album recently.

TS: Yeah, I’m really good at not following it. I really appreciate the team, like we work so hard and we’re lucky because the people we’re about to hand it to, they don’t really show up. We’ll go have a party this weekend and then we turn it over to these other twelve people, and the musicians will do the same and say, “You guys go do whatever it is you do with it and we won’t bug you. Take your pictures or whatever you need to do, and if you need me to be some place, I’ll be there.” I try not to get to much thinking about. I’ve seen Robert Earl do it, but if somebody brings me the promotion plan or some s**t, I will stop making up poems for a couple of days. It feels like somebody is trying to shift your brain over to the other side and make you think about cognizant rational stuff.

MR: That works well for you with your lyrics. For instance, we were talking about “You Got Away With It (A Tale Of Two Fraternity Brothers)” in which there are levels that you can read into that song that I guess you’re very conscious of.

TS: Yeah, the guy that I feel like I study the most, and I think Jimmy would say this, would be Shel Silverstein. He did this linear song that if you listen to it a couple of times, it has different levels it can go to. I always thought that was my favorite kind of song, and that’s the one I always tried to make. I like a Jim Morrison song, where from the first listen, I don’t know what he’s talking about and I have to listen again and create it for myself. On the Shel Silverstein stories, sometimes, the first pass through it you followed the story it was like a movie and I followed it. Then the more times you listen to it, you realize things you didn’t catch before. Like that song “You Got Away With It,” the first time you hear, it it’s about a couple of guys drinking some beers.

MR: The Shel Silverstein connection is interesting because you’re on Twistable Turnable Man with “A Boy Named Sue.”

TS: Yeah, I was really thrilled. Bobby Bare called me up and he’s just a huge hero to me and asked me if I wanted to do that song. It felt like I won a contest, then I got to go do it with him. We got to do it at Johnny Cash’s house and I was very grateful to be able to do that.

MR: You co-wrote “Barbie Doll” with Jack Ingram, right?

TS: Sure. That’s been so many years ago. We were kids when we wrote that. Me and him have written so many songs together…we’re very close, Jack and I. I think he opened a tour for me in ’95 before he became a real country star. We just always stayed friends. I’m really proud of him and all he’s done. He’s out there in Texas where they take it so seriously, that if you make it as a country star, you might as well have run for governor. It’s not easy to be a country star in Texas. I know that sounds silly, but it has its drawbacks. I know that he’s faced some struggles with it. People just run up and punch country stars–it’s weird. I just noticed that that state, for better or for worse, mostly for better if you’re the singer, they take it so seriously like other people take sports.

MR: Also we get Don Henley from that state.

TS: I didn’t realize that, I like that guy.

MR: I also want to talk with you about Vince Herman. You produced and worked on his Great American Taxi album Paradise Lost with him.

TS: I sure did, that was great. Vince and I met at one of those hippy festivals where no one has their shoes on. I had been a fan of Leftover Salmon for a long time, and I didn’t know that he knew who I was. I sat by the side of the stage watching, and when he saw me, he smiled and then put my name into the song. So, I realized he knows who I am, and then afterward, there was some hippy bus like The Partridge Family that somebody was smoking weed in. So, me and Vince took our guitars up there and sat around and played with these hippies. We really formed a bond up there. It was about four years ago, then, like a year later, I was playing in Telluride or something and I saw across the street that Vince was playing and he had his band with him. When my show was over–my folk show started at 8 and his hippy rock show started at 11–I went over to that and they asked me to sit in. They started to call out my songs, so we played a bunch of my songs and I loved the way they did it. We started doing some shows together like that–we were trying to be like Dylan and The Band. It’s been a lot of fun doing that over the last few years. We put out The Storytellerwith Vince’s band backing me up on it. When it came time for them to make a record, I didn’t produce them so much as I introduced them to my friend Eric McConnell who does my records. I sort of sat there and guarded the door. “I’ll make sure nobody comes in and bugs you guys and you do what you do.” They don’t really need my help. I learned a lot from them, I think I’ve chipped in a few lyrics here and there, and said, “Good take,” once or twice. (laughs)

MR: Yeah, when it comes to the role of the producer, these days, that would be the guy that’s there helping you through the process in the studio with you making suggestions when you don’t know if certain lyrics work or if that vocal take was great or not. It’s somebody you can trust who can help with the process and who knows a lot about music.

TS: Yeah, that is it. It feels like you’re trying to get a buddy to help you. I had one record where I asked the guy, “Can you do this for me because I’m not really into it right now.” That was fun too.” “You make the record and I will sing at the end and here are the lyrics.” That was because I was busy doing other things. That was a record called New Connection.Usually, I will just have a friend. Like, for me, I will go down to Eric McConnell’s house and my friends will see my car out there and they will just start coming around. I will have three quarters of a song and last night, we sat around for the last hour trying to think of a line for one of my songs and I never did. But we’ll get it this morning.

MR: It’s nice that you were born to do this.

TS: At 45, I’m still sort of mad for it. It’s a different body that I’m doing it in, but the brain is…well I bet you I have half the brains now then I had then. I still like to write poems and when I was eighteen, I was like, “I don’t give a crap what the world wants from me, I know what I want from the world, I like poems. I don’t care what I get from them, and this is what I do.” Lately, I’ve been feeling that more and more. It’s a big company we have now. It’s great that we have a company, but I just like to chisel on my little poems for whatever it’s worth.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

TS: My blanket answer for that is don’t ask me for any advice. (laughs) First of all, don’t ask Todd Snider because he don’t know s**t all. (laughs) To be kind of serious though, that’s kind of a tough one. Part of me wants to say, “I wouldn’t give you any,” and that would be my best advice,” “Don’t ask for too much of it,” or “Don’t let me tell you what to do.” I think Kris Kristofferson said, “If you’re doing it for the right reason, there is no chance you will fail.” I think there’s some truth to that, but I don’t really know if I would have any good advice. I’m getting older but I still just feel like I’m getting older, and I still just feel more prone to ask for it than give it.

MR: It also ties into the concept of being in an old body, I get it. I’m in a middle-aged body, but I don’t see a difference between me now and me at eighteen, and I never did.

TS: Yeah, that’s just it. There’s this kid from my home town that just moved here to do it, and I really believe in him. He’s got this look in his eye like he’s not sure why he does this all day. I bet you’ll want to check on this kid in a few years. I live in East Nashville so every night when you go to the bar, there’s another kid that just got there. The thing we say to him is, “Welcome home, man.” Usually, when someone gets here, they came from someplace where their dream is really foreign and silly. Then you get here and everyone has the same thing. “I want to be Johnny Cash, my neighbor wants to be Johnny Cash.” We all do. Everybody wants to be Kris Kristofferson and it’s not some pie in the sky dream. It doesn’t just have to be one of us, we can all be Hank Williams and it doesn’t matter what your friends back home think. Anyone that’s reading this and loves music, get to East Nashville, just go to the 3 Crow Bar. Your brothers and sisters are waiting for you there right now.

MR: Anything got your eye recently in politics? Occupy Wall Street, etc.?

TS: Yeah, I’ve got a new song about a guy from Arkansas I know and the song is called “Good Things Happen To Bad People.” It speaks to that story, it’s just one person’s little story of how somebody could end up Occupying Wall Street. I hope that people doing that would hear the song and feel empathized with, although, as much as I sing about politics, I see it just the same as professional wrestling. Our sports politics are very similar to professional wrestling, only we try to make believe that we’re doing things and it’s serious. I think it’s just entertainment–some pot holes get fixed, but mostly guys bluster and they either catch on or are really liked like Justin Beiber or they go home like the kid you’ve never heard of.

MR: Amazing. Todd this has been really wonderful, thank you very much for everything.

TS: Thank you so much, Mike.

Transcribed by Theo Shier