From Skip Anderson
Todd Snider is not your typical jam-band front man. He rose through the ranks of Nashville’s Music Row machine in the 1990s, only to get caught in, and spit out by, its cogs. Despite the cold shoulder from Nashville’s establishment, or perhaps because of it, Snider cultivated a notable career as an independent artist and folk singer. What he lacks in ability to conform to the norms of the music business, he more than makes up for in songwriting talent, performance charisma, and dogged dedication to developing a fervent national following as a pot-smoking, hallucinogen taking, storytelling, hard-touring troubadour.
Three years ago, the then 47-year-old torchbearer for East Nashville’s fertile music scene formed Hard Working Americans, a supergroup comprised by himself and jam-band royalty: Dave Schools (Widespread Panic), Neal Casal (Chris Robinson Brotherhood), Chad Staehly (Great American Taxi), Duane Trucks (Widespread Panic), and Jesse Aycock (Paul Benjamin Band). Rest in Chaos, Hard Working Americans’ second album, is a remarkable record, an exercise in eclectic musicianship and masterful lyricism that deserves strong consideration come award season. Chaos deserves enough promotional gusto to grow beyond the limited commercial reach of jam-bands to find a much wider audience–Rest in Chaos rocks, and it may be Todd Snider at his finest, his loudest, and his most frenetic centeredness. Chaos started out as a concept album with each song to be written about a person of cultural significance. But the band, which collectively shares many songwriting credits on Chaos, decided to steer away from that; only two hints of the remain on the finished product. “Acid” is about Charles Manson, according to Snider. The only concrete evidence is the mention of, Kathleen Maddox, his mother, in the song’s opening line. And Snider weaves a narrative about Elvis Presley into “Burnout Shoes,” a song about a troubled teen who finds himself defiant but sorrowful in his estrangement from his family. “Leaving I don’t mind, as much as being left behind.” The line repeats itself in “Roman Candles,” a lyrically free-flowing, slow-burn guitar-clinic that’s also a page to dog-ear in the Oregon-native’s considerable songwriting catalog. Snider attributes the lyrical repetition to a poetic approach to songwriting he’s undertaken in the past few years. “If I see something that I think is moving, or I see something that is pretty or hear something that I think is witty, I keep it in a collection like a deck of cards that I keep with me all the time,” Snider tells The BoZone from his home in Nashville. “I throw them down until I feel like they’re landing in the right spots. All the words to all the poems [that became songs on Chaos] spent a little time in all the other poems, so it’s kind of collage-y. Then you wait [to see] the heart of the poem and you can see what works.” Surprisingly, the “collage-y” approach he took to most of the songs on the record yields a cohesive and complete work. (Snider wrote “Acid” and “It Runs Together” the “old way,” he says, and “The High Price of Inspiration,” the record’s only cover song, is by Guy Clark and Jedd Hughes.)
Rest in Chaos is lyrically brilliant and bolstered by hard-driving, rock-and-roll swagger. The first line on the record’s first track might mislead listeners to expect Chaos to be filled with clever word play, which it is, but the songs also have depth. In “Opening Statement,” Snider quickly reveals he’s exploring major themes, too, including considering one’s legacy when facing the great truth of our own impermanence. “I may never know this road I’m on, the here and now, or the gone, the coming home or the running away. You’re going to miss my laugh somewhere along the way.”
Although Snider described Chaos as a divorce album, which certainly accounts for the dark overtones of several of the songs, in only one does he directly address his former spouse. Snider and his former wife Melita divorced about a year ago, and he name-checks her in the record’s second cut, “It Runs Together.” In it, he tells their hilariously harrowing–and true–origin story as young lovers who met in rehab. As a palate cleanser, HWA next offer one of the record’s most danceable songs, “Half Ass Moses,” which recasts the bearded biblical figure as a man too lazy to carry fire-etched stone tablets down a mountaintop. And somewhere between divorce and Danceable Moses falls “Dope is Dope,” which is wonderfully pure, hook-laden, radio-ready pop–well radio-ready for stations who don’t mind songs about the creative powers of marijuana versus a mother’s objection. “Dope,” co-written with rockabilly linchpin Chuck Mead of BR5-49 fame, promises to be a crowd-pleaser, likely to have festival-goers singing along by the second chorus. “Our goal is to get people to dance,” Snider says. “I always thought that was the deepest and most profound thing you can do,” Snider says. “Everybody in this band is interested in serving the song, that’s the main thing.”
Hard Working Americans will perform at Bozeman’s Sweet Pea Festival on Sunday, August 7th at 3pm.
Visit sweetpeafestival.org/ for wristband information. •
