From the beginning of his career, Todd Snider has combined his estimable songwriting skills with a knack for storytelling that showcases both a stand-up comic’s timing and a novelist’s eye for detail. Since his astonishing 1994 debut, Songs for the Daily Planet, Snider has dazzled fans and peers with his use of language and his ability to impart messages that convey emotion, indignation, outrage, heartbreak and humor with a laconic delivery and a deft mastery of Folk, Americana and Roots, all embodied in the troubadour tradition.
And if his studio recordings — The Devil You Know, Peace Queer and Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables among them — provided solid proof of his numerous gifts, then his various live releases, including Near Truths and Hotel Rooms and the spectacular and aptly titled Todd Snider Live: The Storyteller, displayed just how brilliant he translates those gifts onstage.
Snider’s life is the basis for the majority of his well-told tales. He began writing songs the day after seeing Jerry Jeff Walker in Texas (two and a half decades later, he recorded an album of Walker’s songs as a loving tribute), he stalked John Prine in Nashville until Prine hired him as a gofer and finally signed him as an artist, and his boundless capacity for living and then spinning the subsequent yarn ultimately led to a natural conclusion, Snider’s first book, 2014’s I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like.
Years ago, Snider created an alter ego, Elmo Buzz, which was primarily a ruse to get around contract restrictions prohibiting him from playing within the range of a venue he’d recently visited, known in the business as radius clauses. For his new album, Eastside Bulldog, Snider has fleshed out his Elmo Buzz character into an actual recording artist. The songs were written extemporaneously in the studio, and Snider has given his character loves, motivations and axes to grind, including Hank Williams Jr., cars, chicks, parties, fights and Todd Snider, respectively. The music on Eastside Bulldog finds Snider tapping into early influences like Guy Clark and Billy Joe Shaver — as well as seminal Rock pioneers like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis — to craft a real soundtrack for his imaginary enemy. How will that impact the way Snider approaches the rest of his set on this tour? Only Tony Clifton knows, and he ain’t talking.
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This article appears in Oct 12-19, 2016.
