So I have been a Todd Snider Fan since I heard his debut album Songs For The Daily Planet. I love “Alright Guy” and all the rest and think that “You think You Know Somebody” is one of the best songs about child abuse EVER! Anyway, I think that the last CD I bought was East Nashville Skyline. Since then I’ve mostly listened to his albums on Rhapsody and The Excitement Plan stayed on the mp3 player for a long while. So when the new CD Todd Snider Live – The Storyteller I quickly went Napster and downloaded it onto my player and thought it would be a good way to catch up with his music. Here’s what Paste Magazine says in their review about the new album:
Equal parts Shel Silverstein, Jerry Jeff Walker and Mitch Hedberg, wise-cracking folkie Todd Snider released Live: The Storyteller, an album that documents the thoroughly entertaining stage presence he is known for. More than just a singer/songwriter, Snider is a full-blown yarn-spinner in both his music and his between-song banter. “If you’ve never seen me before, my name is Todd Snider,” he says at the beginning of most shows. “I’ve been driving around for 15 years making this shit up, singing it for anybody that’ll listen to it. Some of it’s sad. Some of it’s funny. Some of it’s short. Some of it’s longer than others. And sometimes I’ll go on for as many as 18 minutes in between the songs
More including an interview with Todd
And Live-The Storyteller is truly an album of Todd Snider being Todd Snider (with like it says above some Mitch Hedberg thrown in) which means you get great songs accompanied by great stories! Now, this may not be an album that I’ll listen to every day but I’ll wager that on those days that I need a few laughs I’m going to be playing it and listening to: the story that goes along with “Rose City” involving a tunnel drinking and Todd Snider Rules! Along with the K K Rider and Bill Elliot stories and my favorite “The Mushroom Story” which invloves the birth of the Todd Snider we know and love! – The Mushroom story involves football and mushrooms, blocking sleds that turn into Fred G. Sanford and it just cracked me up! The story leads into “Conservative Christian, Right Wing Republican straight white American Males” which is actually his closing number to be followed by two encore songs ending with “Good Fortune” and that’s what we have the good fortune to have Todd Snider singing and telling stories to us! I did have the pleasure of meeting him several years ago at a concert in Haddon Heights NJ and I told him that I wished he had played “You Think You Know Somebody” and he said that, if he had known he would have!
Here’s the K K Rider story and “Don’t It Make You Want To Dance” that appears on the album: