Todd Snider is in pain.
And fans hoping to catch the gritty, live-it-to-the-hilt storyteller in person would be wise to catch the full-band tour he is launching at the end of October in support of High, Lonesome and Then Some, his just released new album.
After more than three decades of hard living on the road, Snider has been mostly away from the stage since 2022, suffering from spinal stenosis. The 14-show run that kicks off on Oct. 30 at the Gothic Theater in Englewood, Colorado, could very well be Snider’s last tour.
Snider is also reckoning with a pileup of grief and heartache that has compounded itself over the past decade: close friends died and various personal relationships went south. He’s dealt with the resulting pain by writing a flurry of songs, nine of which made the cut for High, Lonesome and Then Some, Snider’s first record of all-new material since 2021’s First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder.
“I couldn’t tour, so I got into this routine of working on songs and all kinds of other different art, along with this meditation thing I’ve gotta do,” Snider tells Rolling Stone. “I kind of blended it all together. I would be painting and making songs at the same time, and I was alone the whole time. When it came time to record, I felt like I wanted to sit in the same chair.”
Snider says he’s often modeled his art after Jerry Jeff Walker, the cosmic-cowboy troubadour that he regards as a hero who died in 2020. “He tried to create moments, and make it like a fun trip when you make an album,” Snider says. “I tried to do that.”
The result is a nine-track record that plays out slowly and deliberately. Snider’s cracking vocals are laid over simple drums and riffs closer to blues than folk. This is intentional, and it’s where the “high” in the title comes into play. Snider wanted the record to evoke the feeling of being stoned and slowing down the pace of life to something he can process. It came to him when he began picking a Waylon Jennings song and then overlaid a Bob Marley song on top, creating what he called a “slow choogle,” which he made the theme of the LP.
“That was really hard to get to, and we put a lot of time into it,” Snider says. “I’m not musical or known for that. I had an idea for a country music that we hadn’t heard before, and I think we got it. It’s a thing I’ve been trying to figure out forever, where I make up a song on the two and the four, like a country song, and then I redo it on the three, and it pushes all the words apart, and then I put it back together.”
There’s a theme of solitude that stretches across the record. For roughly the first half, the songs are held together by a sort of yearning — for a person, for the open road, or for the idea of freedom.
In the opening track “The Human Condition,” Snider takes a step-back assessment of the world he’s inhabited as an artist. “Have to wonder what we’re doing here together,” he sings, “even though I know I’m leaving here alone.” A few songs later, in “While We Still Have a Chance,” Snider makes a plea for someone to accompany him to Reno, Nevada, “Way out where legend grows up through the cracks/and no one knows how good freedom feels.”
The second half of the album finds Snider feeling heavily introspective. He’s working through baggage, assessing broken relationships and confronting the notions of loneliness and desolation head-on.
“It’s all heartache,” Snider says. “I wouldn’t say I’m better, and I don’t think I’m going to get better, but the last decade was hard in my personal life. In the last couple of years, it’s gotten harder, and I felt like the title. I sat out here by myself and had, like, a dark night of the soul.”
Snider struggled to process the 2020 deaths of Walker and John Prine. He paid tribute to Prine with the song “Handsome John,” but there had been other losses he internalized until he began writing High, Lonesome and Then Some. In 2019, a pair of musicians close to Snider — Jeff Austin and Neil Casal — died abruptly. Austin had played mandolin in the Yonder Mountain String Band, one of Snider’s favorites, and Casal had performed with Snider in the group Hard Working Americans.
“I was really close to both of them,” Snider says. “I talked to both of them on the day they left us. I still struggle with that the most of all of it. Then there were a couple of breakups. We all have our day.”
Snider sought out Aaron Lee Tasjan, Robbie Crowell and Joe Bisirri to produce the record and help him probe those notions of heartbreak and pain. “Aaron helped me figure out this thing, where I was trying to make my songs sound lazy,” he says. “The song ‘High Lonesome and Then Some’ sounds sloppy and lazy, but it’s not. It’s just new.”
For Tasjan, a Grammy nominee in 2022 who modeled his career after Snider’s, producing the album doubled as a major responsibility and a chance to gain first-hand insight into Snider’s creative outlets. They spent nearly two weeks recording, doing full takes of each song repeatedly before piecing together portions into what became the final cuts. Tasjan says it adds an experimental, artistic feel to an organic folk record.
“You don’t really produce Todd Snider, you just wield his genius,” Tasjan tells Rolling Stone. “Really, I had an innate sense that all I could do was mess it up, so I did my best to just kind of stay true to what I’ve always known to be the touch stones of his music — and some of that is wild and unpredictable. That’s exactly what it was like. I had no idea that we were just gonna go in and record all 11 songs for the album in one take, over and over again.”
“This record kind of encapsulates every Snider-ism that there’s ever been,” Tasjan add, “in the most beautiful way. That’s what I’m most proud of. We made the most Todd Snider record that we possibly could.”
Where Snider takes things from here is very much up in the air. He already has enough songs for another record after High, Lonesome and Then Some. However painful loneliness can be, Snider knows he can deal with it by channeling it into art. But most of what’s next for Snider will be impacted by his physical pain, and on how his body responds to his upcoming tour. Snider will play 13 shows in 18 days on this trek, and he hopes to discover a lot more about his future after that.
“I told my team that I want this tour to be the funnest one. I at least want to do it one more time. After that, I may just have to do one show at a time, but that’s been coming for a while,” he says. ““I’ve got this arthritic shit they call stenosis, which makes it painful all over… I do a lot of things to try to help it, but I have to make peace with it, too. Which hasn’t been easy.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.
