Life lessons: 'Excitement,' good or bad, provides Todd Snider with inspiration

Todd Snider

Todd Snider

"Some of this trouble just finds me/Most of this trouble I've earned/How do you know when it's too late?/How do you know when it's too late to learn?"

"Greencastle Blues" by Todd Snider

One afternoon last summer, singer-songwriter Todd Snider found himself in a jail cell in Greencastle, Ind., charged with possession of less than an ounce of marijuana. "Greencastle Blues," the song depicting the incident, is an early stand-out from Snider's new album, "The Excitement Plan."

"I wrote that while I was in jail," says Snider in a call from his home in Nashville. "It ended up being weird, because, afterwards, when I got to the gig, they (the Greencastle officers) were all there. So it ended up the guy who arrested me and all the other ones were in the dressing room getting (expletive)-faced! I had my picture made with all of them and I still had to pay a fine!"

Snider says the officers were nice to him probably more from his attitude than the fact he is an entertainer:

"It was, 'Do you have any marijuana?' and I was like 'Yeah. Right here. What do we do now?' I never lied to them, so they were pretty sweet to me."

Snider has had a circuitous route through the music business and he's never paid attention to the business side of it - "ever," he says:

"It makes some people mad when I say it. I never hung up a poster for a show. I never recorded a demo. I'd just do a show and there'd be some guy from a record company there saying, 'Do you want to make a record?'"

Twice he has found himself on record labels owned by more famous singer-songwriters. His first album, "Songs for the Daily Planet," (1994) was released on Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville Records. He had offers from other labels, but they didn't have a chance.

"Once I met Jimmy Buffett, I didn't care about anybody else," he says. "And he had a boat!"

Later, Snider signed with John Prine's O Boy Records.

While fans, critics and peers have always championed Snider, it wasn't until 2006's, "The Devil You Know," his most acclaimed and successful disc, that Snider really began to make a dent in the national consciousness. Recording a follow-up was difficult, and his politically charged 2008 EP "Peace Queer" was made up of songs that Snider had cut from a proposed follow-up album.

Snider enlisted producer Don Was for "The Excitement Plan." A producer, says Snider, is "like somebody who comes in and is your best friend for a while."

Born in Portland, Ore., Snider began writing songs in his late teens and, at about the same time, decided to become a performer.

"Starting from zero you can try anything," says Snider. "So I said, 'I'll try to be a singer in a group.'"

At the advice of his brother, Snider went to Austin, Texas, armed with a bunch of lyrics to look for a band.

"Then I saw Jerry Jeff Walker at Gruene Hall and that night I said, 'Starting tomorrow I'm gonna do that!' I got a guitar the next day and six months later I was making a very, very, very modest living as a folksinger with the 12 songs I had made up."

One of Snider's secret weapons is his ability to spin a yarn between songs.

"It seems there's always some new story to tell when I get to town," he says.

It turns out that "Greencastle Blues" has a little more of a story than is in the song.

"In an ironic twist in the story," says Snider. "The sheriff and I stayed friends and about two months after I got arrested, he got arrested up there and went to jail for two months! Needless to say, he's not the sheriff anymore. He thinks that song is even funnier now, because he's got 'em, too."

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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