In the highly commercialized world of the music industry, Todd Snider and his steadfast honesty are treasured oddities. An ingenious singer-songwriter, Snider and his folksy, down-to-earth disposition have spent the past 25 years becoming the stuff of urban legend in East Nashville. Seen by many as the torchbearer of the songwriting tradition paved by the likes of Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark and John Prine, he’s passed the time living the life of a true troubadour and making records that demonstrate his knack for honest songwriting.
“I wasn’t really good at fiction,” he says, “but I was good at getting into scrapes and rhyming it later.”
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Before the population boom of the past decade (and long before tourist-operated electric scooters), Snider was a mainstay of the bars and songwriting circles of Nashville’s artistic eastside. He fell in love with the neighborhood after moving there in the late ’90s and cemented that love with 2004’s East Nashville Skyline. The acclaimed album is a collection of observations, true stories and confessions from Sinder that demonstrates his ability to be everything from provoking to hilarious to vulnerable. This past November, Snider reissued East Nashville Skyline for the first time.
“It was the 15-year anniversary, somebody pointed out that it had never been on vinyl,” he says. “Sometimes I think of that as my main record, or my best one. By the time I made that record, that was going to be my life, I just sorta made peace with it. Ever since then I feel like I’ve been one of those people built to travel.”
And traveled he has. Snider spent years touring and bouncing around the country before settling in East Nashville. “If you want to be around other songwriters and hear other songs it’s just the place to go,” he says. “You go to one of these bars and the next thing you know it’s like that movie Heartworn Highways.”
In addition to the fertile creative atmosphere of the neighborhood, Snider has also been endeared by it’s ever-increasing eclecticness; “It only gets better the weirder people get,” he says.
“There was this bar called Alice’s — you could take a lawn mower in there and start a tab with it. You could just steal a bike, go in there and say, ‘Can you take this bike and I take a couple of beers?’ and they’d do that,” he recalls. The sense of camaraderie in the city was palpable when Snider first became a mainstay there — and from his point-of-view, that feeling has endured. “If you’re part of the band at all in Nashville, you’re on the home team. It doesn’t matter what band,” he says. “To me, Jack White and Tim McGraw are a couple of musicians. I don’t know either one of them, but I’m rooting for them.”
Perhaps that mindset comes from Snider’s musical rearing. After a stint on Jimmy Buffett’s label, Snider became a protégé of sorts to Prine, who encouraged him to channel his aforementioned honesty into his songcraft. He holds a high reverence for “people singing songs that were just meant to sing to the crowd. Like, ‘What are you going to do with that song?’ I’m gonna sing it in the bar. Why? I don’t know why. Prine and all those people sorta paved that out as a life. Why not just go sing?”
This philosophy was also cemented in Snider’s mind after he was “indoctrinated” by Clark. “Guy had this basement and everybody would eventually wind up down there,” he says. “One day I played him a song and he looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know if I’d play that one.’ That’s not easy to sit through, but I got to play him a lot of songs he liked, too. It was sorta like, ‘If you’re here for anything but just being here, if you’re working on a song for anything other than hearing that song, man you’re going to be miserable.’ It does feel like the people who know they can’t quit even if they try can recognize the other ones.”
In spite of the fact that the modern musical landscape and streaming services have rendered the world that Walker, Clark and Prine came up in as non-existent, their philosophy lives on with help from songwriters like Snider. “Now I’m a cyber busker,” he says. “It’s like you’re on a street corner and anybody could walk by — I feel like it’s all going backwards in a way I like.” Their philosophy also lives on in the artsy burrough east of the Cumberland river that Snider has become such an integral part of. There, that spirit has become entwined with the air and isn’t leaving any time soon.
“That’s what I love about East Nashville,” Snider says, “you make up songs and there’s a place you can go where other people do that too. What a great thing.”