“Is the record out yet?” Todd Snider asked when I called him one recent morning.
The album in question, Snider’s “lost” 2007 LP Crank It, We’re Doomed, wasn’t out then, but it is now. Coincidentally, Snider himself had been missing for a few weeks leading up to the release on November 10th. Reached via his trusty landline, Snider seemed pretty chill about going MIA.
“I don’t have a [cell] phone. I’ve never had a phone. … I don’t have anybody that I have to check in with,” Snider explained. “I took off for a while, but I don’t tell anybody where I went. … And then when I go, I just go. And then when I come back, I come back, but it’s good for me.”
To Todd Snider, being lost isn’t as much a malady as it is a philosophy, one that has made him a freewheeling spirit for the better part of 30 years, playing gigs in just about all 50 states as a prolific singer-songwriter. As he describes it, “I always liked being the sock that you can’t find in the dryer.”
“I don’t think I think there’s a ‘found.’ And I’ve just tried to accept that,” Snider, an absurdist disciple of author Albert Camus (The Stranger), philosophized. “When I was really young I thought that ‘found’ was sort of a myth.”
In a way, that holds true for Crank It, We’re Doomed. Even in the 16 years that the album was “lost”—before it was found in possession of mastering engineer Jim DeMain—it still wasn’t out of reach. Many of the songs from Crank It ended up on subsequent releases Peace Queer (2008), The Excitement Plan (2009), and fan favorite Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables (2012), albeit under different names (“Juice”, “But Seriously Folks”, and “What Made You Do It” from Crank It are all previously unreleased).
While a Todd Snider song by any other name would sound just as sweet, the differences go further than just nomenclature. Familiar tracks like the tale of Doc Ellis‘ “trip” to the ballpark “America’s Favorite Pastime” and the Kris Kristofferson-assisted album closer “Good Fortune” appear on Crank It in new (to us) “Doomed Versions.” These “doomed” takes hear alternate arrangements that oscillate from tidal waves of ’60s California surf rock on “Slim Chance is Still a Chance” to a decidedly more folk-y approach on Jimmy Buffett‘s “West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown”.
“I love the way it sounds. It reminds me of East Nashville when I was listening to it the other day,” Snider said of Crank It, We’re Doomed. “It’s like this was the sound coming out of almost every garage in this neighborhood back at that time when East Nashville first got going. This friend of mine said it was like The Rolling Stones, some people think The Rolling Stones are the best country band ever, and that’s sort of what East Nashville sounded like. It was just stoner country, medicinal Americana, they said.”
It’s perhaps no coincidence that Crank It, We’re Doomed was directly inspired by The Stones’ 1972 opus and Todd’s favorite album Exile On Main Street. Crank It was originally conceived as a direct descendent of great double albums like Exile, Bob Dylan‘s Desire, and The Beatles‘ 1968 self-titled, a.k.a. “The White Album.” At 15 tracks totaling just 48 minutes, however, it fell a bit short of the mark, one of several contributing factors that led Todd to shelve the LP.
“I remember at the time that I had really been studying language the same way somebody else, like if you were a trumpet player you would learn everything you could about [the trumpet],” Todd said when asked why he decided not to release Crank It in 2007. “I got to this place where I think I thought that language had been a mistake. … It felt like you can use words to do anything and that they’re just sounds coming out of people’s faces. It feels like it was a really arbitrary thing that people invented. Sometimes I think that music notes are the way we were supposed to communicate. … But then the other answer is I was I think in sixth grade, I guess, when I started getting called crazy. So there you go.”
Of course, it’s a bit ironic for a venerated singer-songwriter with 20 albums to his name to speculate that language was a mistake—about as ironic as a musician promoting an album that turned up missing—but it’s also not surprising coming from a man who cites Little Richard‘s “Tutti Frutti” line, “Wop bop a loo bop a lop bom bom,” as his favorite lyric.
“The older I get, the more I think beats and notes are more expressive,” Todd clarified when pressed on his philosophy. “Booker T. & the M.G.’s probably say more than me. But then words, the alphabet is what I played, so that’s how I got in the band.”
That was how he got in the band when first starting his career back in the early 1990s. As Todd explained, Crank It, We’re Doomed was a turning point where he was just getting into playing guitar. Some 16 years later he says he’s “pretty good.” But the garage rock buzz heard on songs like “Juice”, “Handleman’s Revenge”, and “The Last Laugh” is a clear predecessor to his 2016 experiment Eastside Bulldog, which grew out of his alter ego Elmo Buzz, an alias he began using for local gigs around Nashville to skirt radius clauses.
“At that time I was making up so many songs. I made up so many songs about so many things,” Snider remembered. “And then at night, I would take a break and make up those Bulldog songs. … I sort of went in a lot of different directions at once and changed my names a few times and never really got the plot. I’m not necessarily trying to find the plot. But at some point I sort of lost it and stopped looking for it. I’m not saying that as a negative either. I think that might’ve been what I was trying to do.”
While Todd may feel that he “lost the plot,” there are some things he held onto from Crank It, We’re Doomed. Less doomed versions of the songs showed up on proceeding albums and Snider would pick up a line or lyric here and there to drop into another song, like a cross between an artistic auto mechanic and Dr. Frankenstein.
“It kind of makes me think back when I was a kid, there was this guy that had a big property with a shit ton of cars on it. And he would always be working on two and then going out to all those other cars to get parts for the two he was working on,” Snider recollected.
A prime example of this practice in action is the song that appears on Crank It as “Mercer’s Folly”. Snider’s devoted fans, known as “Shitheads,” will recognize the lyrics as “Big Finish” but placed to the tune of “Brenda” from Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables. Continuing his analogy, “It’s like that engine didn’t end up staying in that car.”
The name “Mercer’s Folly” is a reference to Bob Dylan and the man who signed him, John Hammond, whose bosses at Columbia were none too pleased when they heard the young folkie’s grating voice. They nicknamed Dylan “Hammond’s Folly,” with Snider making the same joke about Margaritaville Records executive Bob Mercer, who first signed him and brought him into the recording industry, acting as a mentor through much of Todd’s career. Mercer passed away in 2010 at the age of 65 from lung cancer.
Mercer isn’t the only ghost found on Crank It, We’re Doomed, a continuing trend from Todd’s previous eulogy-filled release First Agnostic Church of Hope & Wonder. Unlike that last album, however, these songs were created as contemporary collaborations or homages the person could actually hear.
There’s the lovely honky tonk swinging duet “Don’t Tempt Me Baby” with late “Coal Miner’s Daughter” Loretta Lynn, the doomed version of Buffett’s “West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown”, and the previously unreleased song “What Made You Do It”. Todd wrote the rhetorical buzzy blues query in response to the 2007 incident when his friend and mentor Billy Joe Shaver shot a man in the face outside a Texas bar (he was later found not guilty of aggravated assault by way of self-defense).
“Yeah, it’s been really hard. All my mentors, except for Kris [Kristofferson], are gone, and it’s been hard to adjust to,” Snider said. “I’m just trying to process all these phone numbers that don’t work anymore, there’s tons of them.”
The past few years have handed Todd his fair share of heartache. First Agnostic Church was lined with tributes for Jeff Austin, Neal Casal, John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker, and more. Since then, he’s lost Lynn, Buffett who was a major early supporter, Peter Cooper who helped Snider write his excellent memoir I Never Met A Story I Didn’t Like, and even his former high school sweetheart.
“Everybody goes through loss, it’s just my turn,” Snider sighed, resigned to his fate.
Todd processes his grief as you may expect, through playing guitar and singing, as well as painting, gardening, tending to his geese, “all kinds of artsy fartsy stuff.” For a long time, the road was also Snider’s comfort. However, a few months back he canceled his remaining tour dates to undergo surgery for a non-life-threatening condition that would nevertheless leave him unable to sing for some time.
“I’m hoping I’m in recovery from something, so it’s going to be a while before I can tour again.” When asked if he was okay, he said cautiously, “I think so. I think so. Yeah, I think so. … I’m not sure what’s going on right now, it’s not like I knew what was going on before [chuckles], but we’ll see.”
The feeling of being homebound isn’t entirely new to Snider. During the pandemic, his weekly Sunday livestreams known by many names including The Get Together, What It Is, and the First Agnostic Church of Hope & Wonder were a beacon of light when stages went dark across the country.
“That was a strange time, and everyone was so down that we made this really up music,” Todd recollected. “It was really helpful for us during that time to be able to get together during the day and being like, ‘That’s right, you dumb motherfuckers,’” he laughed, quoting “The Get Together“.
For now, Snider is keeping busy. The “artsy fartsy” stuff has led him back to Crank It, We’re Doomed producer Eric McConnell to work on a new album. Todd cites Eric as one of his favorite producers and takes credit for bringing a busking Sierra Ferrell off the street in Nashville and into Eric’s studio, with McConnell going on to produce her first two albums. As far as the direction of his next release, Snider says it’s “I guess what you’d call folk rock,” closer to the sounds of Crank It than his previous stylistic forays on First Agnostic and Eastside Bulldog.
“I’d like to try to have one [album] done in the next nine months,” Snider said. “And I’ve got one, two, three, four, five, six songs, and then I’ve also got some other songs that I wrote with other people that are on their records, like Loretta and Billy Joe and Dan Reeder and [Jack] Ingram. I got some co-writes that ended up on some other people’s. And then I also still make up songs for [garage rock band] the Bulldogs, and so I think I’d like to try to make another record like that someday.”
Returning to the album at hand, the Crank It, We’re Doomed saga bears resemblance to another “lost” Snider project. This one truly is out there in the wind, and is summarized on his 2022 live album Return of the Storyteller in the track “Where Will I Go“. The title shares its name with a song Todd has been chasing for some 30 years. So far, what he’s got is the line, “Where will I go, now that I’m gone?” In a similar vein to how the Crank It masters eluded Todd for 16 years, “Where Will I Go” has dangled just out of reach for nearly twice as long.
“I’ve been making up songs since I was 19 years old,” Snider said on the live album. “My first song was about money. I hated it when I was 19 years old, thought it tore my family apart. My next song was about being a bus boy, ’cause I was a bus boy. And that sent me down to an open mic … and when I got to the open mic I realized I think that this is what I wanted to do. I didn’t know that I could but I knew that I just wanted to chase songs around and if I could find a way to pull it off and get away with it I would be eternally grateful.”
Almost 40 years later, Snider is still out there chasing songs. Whether he’s running them down on the road or in his living room is irrelevant for a man whose only direction is not knowing where he’s going next. Maybe Todd was right when he said that “found” is just a myth. Here’s a man who has made a career out of being aimless, going so far as to name his label Aimless Records. His compass adheres to no cardinal directions, only the pursuit of creativity. And along that journey, might as well turn on the radio and Crank It.
“That is strange and that is odd to feel like, to sort of set out in every direction at once and then end up feeling lost, like a paradox or something,” Snider observed. “I wasn’t really trying to get somewhere, but I guess you still got to ask directions sometimes even when you’re not heading anywhere.”
Todd Snider – Crank It, We’re Doomed
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