A conversation with Todd Snider feels like a spin down a gravel road, with a cool drink at the end. He's been writing songs and singing them across the country for a decade and a half, having left Portland, Ore., at 18 to follow in the guitar chords of John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker and Nanci Griffith.
Though he's married now and living in Nashville, Snider still travels most of the time, and he's still gooey-eyed about his heroes and heroines.
On Sunday at 7 p.m., Snider will open for Griffith at the Red Butte Garden Amphitheater (advance tickets are $24, day-of-show tickets are $26; call 325-SEAT [7328]). The "queen of folkabilly" will perform songs from her new CD, "Clock Without Hands," after a Snider set mixing some Prine-like wit with his own cocktail of wide-eyed humility.
"I saw Nanci at this bar in Nashville the other day, and she remembered me. That made me happy," Snider, 35, said in a telephone interview. His scratchy voice and postmodern prism on American life make him salt to Griffith's sugar. "She's somebody I've always looked up to. I just hope her crowd likes my stuff."
Snider's 2002 release, "New Connection," glints with gems such as "Crooked Piece of Time," a Prine song that lodged in Snider's head as he watched the news on Sept. 11.
Yesterday morning an ill wind came
blew your picture right out of the picture frame
even blew the candle out from underneath the flame . . .
it's a crooked piece of time that we live in
Lest you think Snider's on a bummer, he stirs in humor with songs like "Beer Run" and "Statistician's Blues." A show, he says, should be like a rollercoaster, taking the audience on emotional highs and lows. "I hate to use that phrase, 'I laughed, I cried,' but that's what I want."
After admiring Prine for years, Snider became his driver, picking him up at the Nashville airport one time and running errands while Prine worked on his 1991 CD "The Missing Years." Prine went out to see Snider play one night at a club, and the two men have been collaborators ever since.
"He puts himself all the way out there without being pretentious," Snider said. Songwriters such as Prine and Jerry Jeff Walker "dare me to put myself out there. But sometimes you can go too far into that pool. Sing something like, 'I'm bleeding on the inside,' and some people will just say, 'Shut up!' "
Snider has sought that balance between melodrama and introspection on five CDs, starting with "Songs for the Daily Planet" on MCA in 1994. With 2000's "Happy to Be Here," he went to Oh Boy Records, Prine's label. Like Robert Earl Keen and Steve Earle, Snider is popular with critics and alternative-country DJs, and roams the terrain of singer-songwriters who don't at all mind being overlooked by commercial-hit radio.
Snider has been called the new Prine; Prine was called a new Bob Dylan; so Snider's a new new Dylan. He's driven, like those two predecessors, to put his own stamp on his songs and peddle them on the road. "I've never been addicted to a hard drug. But I've been around people like that, and musicians are similar," he said. If an addict runs out of his substance, "he'll drive for three hours to buy some. And a musician will say, 'I'm going to play two songs at this mall, it's going to take five hours to get there, but I'm going to do it. I've got to hear some clapping.' "
Snider added, "When you're poor, money's not an issue. A lot of people get a lot of money for doing something they don't want to do," while saving for a far-off retirement. It's a shame, the songwriter says, to spend most of your life somewhere you don't want to be, waiting to go somewhere else for a few years.
"The day after someday" takes too long to come, Snider says. "Hey, I'm going to write a song about that."
E-MAIL: durbani@desnews.com