Review of a Todd Snider show in NYC

A Bit Wry and Rough at the Edges


Published: March 7, 2010
Barefoot, his shirt untucked, a hat pulled down over his forehead, the 43-year-old alt-country singer-songwriter Todd Snider looked the epitome of a scruffy modern troubadour ambling along a rutted Southern highway on the way to nowhere.

Skip to next paragraph

Richard Perry/The New York Times
Todd Snider at the Allen Room, a move up from “the sofa circuit.”




But the setting wasn’t East Nashville, where Mr. Snider lives; it was the Allen Room in Frederick P. Rose Hall, where he appeared on Thursday evening as part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series.

In the stripped-down area where country meets folk, sometimes called Americana, there hasn’t been a phrasemaker as wryly quotable since when — the heyday of Kris Kristofferson and John Prine? “I am a runaway locomotive/ Outta my one-track mind/ And I’m lookin’ for any kinda trouble I can find,” goes Mr. Snider’s “Play a Train Song,” which describes a swaggering blue-collar archetype who appears in many of his songs. He may not be one of them, but he understands them.

The 90-minute show drew a devoted plaid-shirt-and-jeans crowd that seemed to know every Snider song lyric. In the Rose Hall elevator to the Allen Room, some fans even carried beers.

As Mr. Snider strummed his guitar, played harmonica and told stories of his adventures, a scuffling live-by-your-wits world of brawling in country-music bars, crash pads and substance abuse came alive. Mr. Snider told of his years spent on “the sofa circuit,” when he stayed wherever there was an available couch. One amusing tale involved an encounter with a grifter named Tony Bennett who helped him paint his car, then stole $65 from him as they hugged farewell.

Mr. Snider’s country-blues songs are deceptively casual and charming. The more you contemplate them, the sturdier and deeper they seem. He presents himself as a live-and-let-live fatalist who has seen too much of the world to pass judgment on anyone. Early in the show he declared that he had no opinions. Later he mocked the notion of such a thing as “a serious song.” Sad? Yes. Serious, no.

But his anthem, “Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight, White American Males,” has the ring of an oppositional retort by a performer who is on the side of “tree huggin’, love makin’, pro choicin’, gay weddin’, widespread diggin’ hippies” like himself.

Speaking of phrasemaking, here is an excerpt from “Easy Money”: “Everybody wants the most they can possibly get/ For the least they could possibly do.”

This is the same down-at-the-heels ethos that Mr. Kristofferson summed up four decades ago with the catchphrase that in some ways began it all: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Sign in to RecommendNext Article in Arts (18 of 27) » A version of this article appeared in print on March 8, 2010, on page C6 of the New York edition.