From RollingStone: Todd Snider, Rambling Troubadour Who Helped Shape Alt-Country and Americana, Dead at 59
Todd Snider, a singer, songwriter, and raconteur who helped shape the alt-country and Americana music movements, died Friday. He was 59. Rolling Stone confirmed Snider’s death. No cause of death was given, but Snider reportedly was diagnosed with pneumonia this week.
Listen to the interview that Todd did on The Paul Leslie Hour
“Aimless, Inc. Headquarters is heartbroken to share that our Founder, our Folk Hero, our Poet of the World, our Vice President of the Abrupt Change Dept., the Storyteller, our beloved Todd Daniel Snider has departed this world,” a message read on Snider’s Facebook page.
Born in Portland, Oregon, and relocating to northern California after high school, Snider rambled his way to Texas in the 1980s, where he met and was mentored by the songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker. In the Nineties, he migrated to Nashville, becoming a key figure in the rough-edged East Nashville scene. His 2004 album East Nashville Skyline is considered essential to the alt-country catalog.
“I’ve always been into being a troubadour. I love the chaos, that life of adventure — that’s what struck me. I had a predisposition for it,” Snider told Rolling Stone in 2023. “I was a hitchhiker and sofa circuit person. Jerry Jeff made me see that the difference between a free spirit and a freeloader is three chords on the guitar.”
Along with Walker, Snider befriended and learned from songwriting greats like Billy Joe Shaver, John Prine, Jimmy Buffett, Guy Clark, and Kris Kristofferson. “Nobody’s ever deserved there to be a heaven more than John Prine,” Snider told Rolling Stone in 2020 following the singer-songwriter’s death. “And if there’s not a heaven, they oughta get one together pretty quick, because John’s coming.”
The loss of each of those guiding lights for Snider (Walker died six months after Prine) shook the musician — “I sing about dead friends more than girls these days,” he said in the press materials for what would be his last album, 2025’s High, Lonesome and Then Some. But they also left him as the flag-bearer for a certain type of songwriting, one informed by lived experiences, both good and bad, and plainspoken, honest lyricism.
“One thing I learned from John Prine is if you’re not embarrassing yourself, then I don’t know,” Snider told Rolling Stone in 2014. “You don’t want to just be that guy, trying to present themselves as the perfect product. I’m not a product. You know, like Kathie Lee Gifford-type people. I just saw her on TV. And if she wrote a book, I bet you it would just be full of her not ever making mistakes.”
In his 2014 memoir, I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like, Snider openly shared many of his missteps with the world, proving himself just as fearless an author as he was a songwriter. In one tale, he recalled an onstage meltdown during a show in L.A.; in another, he detailed an incident in which Jimmy Buffett, infuriated by Snider’s refusal to play the song “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues” in his opening set, pelted him with fruit.
That mix of stubbornness and courageousness is what endeared Snider to fans and peers alike. While artists from Gary Allan and Mark Chesnutt to Loretta Lynn and Tom Jones all recorded his songs, and he released Songs for the Daily Planet (with Buffett’s help) on the major label MCA, Snider never abandoned his DIY roots. He put out a strings of albums for Prine’s indie label, Oh Boy Records, beginning with 2000’s Happy to Be Here and culminating with the 2004 masterpiece East Nashville Skyline. The latter contained one of Snider’s signatures, “Play a Train Song,” which Robert Earl Keen recorded in 2011.