Todd Snider died on Saturday at the age of 59.
This changed my plans for the weekend. I hadn’t scheduled several hours on Saturday night to sit around in a melancholy mood watching old Todd Snider concert videos, listening to all of those great songs and stories for the umpteenth time.
But that’s what I wound up doing most of the night. Still, over all, I can’t complain.
Got hit by that news shortly after reading Michael Jimenez’s lovely reflection on Kris Kristofferson, which led me to find this video of Kristofferson playing “Why Me Lord?” with Willie Nelson after telling the story behind that song.
Kristofferson struggles to articulate the story behind the song, I think, because it’s all there in the song itself. It’s what my people would call his “personal testimony”:
“I know what I am,” Kristofferson sings in that song.
That’s a theme that resonates in so many of the songs written and sung by his much younger sometime student, Todd Snider. So much so that Snider never asks “Why me?” but instead poses a different question:
And you know me, I can’t take no preachin’
Not on Sunday, and no other day
But I feel like I oughta be prayin’ to something
And I have no idea what to saySome of this trouble just finds me
Most of this trouble I earned
How do you know when it’s too late
How do you know when it’s too late
How do you know when it’s too late to learn?
That’s from “Greencastle Blues,” which is similar to Kristofferson’s song in that it’s about coming to terms with addiction and personal failings, but in an Indiana jail rather than in a church. And it’s a different kind of coming to terms.
I first heard the title track of Snider’s final album while scrolling social media posts mourning his death on Saturday. It’s a weirdly cheerful, blues-y number called “High, Lonesome, and Then Some,” and it again seems in some ways like a funhouse mirror version of Kristofferson’s “Why Me Lord?”
All I’d ever ask of you would be to forgive me
Again every now and then nearly every day
At least I won’t be pretending I am trying to amend them
When I know I’m always going my own separate wayHigh, Lonesome, and Then Some
What might have been was always meant to be
High, Lonesome, and Then Some
Still looking for someone, looking for someone like me …
The written lyrics there don’t quite do justice to the comic timing of the way Snider sings “forgive me … again … every now and then … nearly every day,” with just enough of a beat in between the words to convey that, as his older mentor sang, “I know what I am” and I know that it’s absurd to ask anybody to forgive me for everything that I know and you know and you know that I know I’m almost certainly going to do (again. every now and then. and nearly every day) to let you down.
This is where I wish I could have told him what it is I believe about that, about that need we all have to be both fully known and also fully loved, and about the recognition that we all have, or should have if we know what we are, that it seems impossible — unbelievable — for both of those things to happen at the same time.
Or, better yet, I wish Kris Kristofferson had still been around to tell him that.
I mean, Kristofferson was one of his heroes, even if Snider, I’m sure, liked the beautifully broken “Sunday Morning Coming Down” far more than the sentimental “Why Me?” As an outlaw country legend and the kind of troubadour Snider always aspired to be, maybe Kristofferson could’ve found a way to tell him that there is, in truth, someone looking for someone like him without that sounding like the ultimate corny youth minister Jesus juke.
Another thing I had just finished reading before reading that other news on Saturday was Peter Enns’s quick-and-dirty introduction to the Song of Songs.
A lot of that discussion involves the obvious question of how on earth this sometimes explicit, often a bit racy, ancient love poetry wound up included in the canon of scripture. I mean this is a book in the Bible that never mentions God at all apart from one place where the lover says her love burns like the flame of God (phew!). The answer, Enns suggests, is due to allegorical readings of the poetry that interpreted it as a metaphor for the love between God and humanity.
But even that allegorical reading rests on the idea that the erotic love described throughout the poem is, itself, a Good Thing. As Enns puts it: “the text insists that ordinary human experience, desire, intimacy, joy has some theological weight.” That this ordinary human experience and joy are sacred and transcendent and worthy in and of themselves.
Todd Snider would’ve bristled at phrases like “theological weight,” but one thing I took from his music and his stories — a thing I took because it was offered and given by them — was that he understood that human experience, desire, intimacy, and joy were all of immeasurable value, even when it’s just two old friends reconnecting in a context that might not seem sacred to that old mainstream.
All of this God-talk here — the Kristoffersson testimony, the theological sheen borrowed from Bible professor Enns — would have made Snider uncomfortable. He was, after all, a proud stoner agnostic, as Robert Christgau described him in one of the best summaries of his career, “Preaching Agnosticism (with Laugh Lines)“:
Snider likes to say he’s an “evangelical agnostic.” Brought up Catholic, he’s religious about his irreligion. The main concern of “Too Soon to Tell” is God’s cruelty, if there is a God: “It seems like even the wicked get worse than they deserve.” Snider has such respect for the dead-end lives he chronicles, such sensitivity to the impending doom all humans share–and is so aware, as he says on Near Truths, that although he’s mainly afraid of Republicans, Democrats scare him too–that he refuses to preach. Although not many American musicians make more of class even today, he won’t politicize any further. Cynics might just figure he’s coddling the Robert Earl Keen fans, and that must enter his mind–how could it not? But I figure the real issue is the perils of hope.
Anyway, if I may share one of my un-rhymed opinions here, I believe human experience is sacred. And that’s why one of my favorite Todd Snider songs wasn’t even one he wrote himself. It’s a song he always said was his parents’ favorite — a song first recorded by Guy Lombardo in 1949 and recorded by Snider in 2004 on his East Nashville Skyline. “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think)” is more like Ecclesiastes than it is like the Song of Songs, but like the rest of the best of Snider’s songs, it’s another piece of wisdom literature that I will keep in my personal spiritual canon even if that requires some allegorical gymnastics.
This is the one that’s been stuck in my head since I read the news on Saturday:
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