Barefooted barb Todd Snider has wafted through piles of dirty clothes, roach clips, and tattered thoughts into his back vault to rescue Crank It, We’re Doomed. The long-lost album The Peace Queer recorded back in 2007 will finally see the light of day on November 10th via his own Aimless Records.
Recorded during what Snider characterizes as the most prolifically creative period of his career, Crank It, We’re Doomed is one of three albums Todd shelved for one reason or another. In the case of Crank It, he paradoxically felt the album was both too much and too little, needing more but already being too much.
“At the end, I was torn,” Snider said. “I felt like not only did I have all these story songs, sort of normal songs, there also were all these protest songs. And really that is where I lost the plot. I had too many scenes in the movie, and I had too many songs. It was all over the map. But I also remember feeling like it wasn’t done either. Like it needed more songs.”
Snider did end up using five of the song recordings from the Crank It sessions on his next two albums, Peace Queer and The Excitement Plan, with three of them appearing under new names. Six of the other 15 tracks found on the album were later re-recorded and appeared on The Excitement Plan and Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables. The original takes from Crank It though present a more raw format in some cases dramatically different than what later came out. Four other tracks on the album are completely new, with a press release claiming “no one outside the musicians and Snider’s inner circle have ever heard.”
With the announcement, Snider shared the “new” old song “Juice”. Based around a buzzy distorted guitar, the song takes a lo-fi feel while recalling a Rolling Stones type of blues with a bit of country rock swagger reminiscent of Exile On Main Street. The comparison is perhaps less than coincidental, as Snider originally planned Crank It, We’re Doomed as a spiritual descendant of the great classic rock double albums like Exile On Main Street, despite the fact Crank It only clocks in at 49 minutes.
On the B-side of “Juice” is also “Don’t Tempt Me”, Todd’s collaboration with the late Lauretta Lynn which found its way to 2009’s The Excitement Plan. Crank It also includes Todd’s collaboration with Kris Kristofferson, “Good Fortune”, a frequent favorite of Todd’s live shows which also appeared on The Excitement Plan.
“It was very much a blur,” Todd said reflecting back on 2007 when he put the album together. “A blur not because of the party going on, but because of how many songs I was coming up with. It was probably the pinnacle of my time making up songs. Like they were really coming at me, and I didn’t know what to do with them all.”
While the term “lost” album is thrown around rather liberally these days, in Snider’s case it was quite literally true. After Todd decided to put Crank It, We’re Doomed on the shelf, the stereo masters went missing. Snider and the album’s producer Eric McConnell looked high and low for it but turned up nothing, with the album fading into memory as the years went by. Recently, however, Todd and Eric met to discuss recording another album and the subject of Crank It, We’re Doomed came up.
“We were sitting there just wracking our brains, ‘Where could it be,’ ” Snider recalled. “And finally Eric said, ‘I guess [mastering engineer Jim] DeMain might have it.’”
Sure enough, he did. Todd Snider’s lost 2007 album Crank It, We’re Doomed was found and the search was over.
Check out the full tracklist for Crank It, We’re Doomed by Todd Snider and stream the first two singles “Juice” and “Don’t Tempt Me” below. The album is available here for pre-order.
Todd Snider – “Juice”, “Don’t Tempt Me”
The post Todd Snider To Release Long-Lost Album ‘Crank It, We’re Doomed’ After 16 Years In The Vault [Listen] appeared first on L4LM.
