I’ve been a fan of Todd Snider for a few years now, and his latest album Excitement Plan is quite good. He’s playing the Mucky Duck tonight, but unfortunately, I won’t get to see him. Andrew Dansby recently interviewed him, and I wanted to memorialize some of the more interesting observations in a post.
On Randy Newman:
He told me his kids liked me. And he said, ‘I’ve never listened to you because my kids like you. If I played you and liked it, it’d ruin my day, and if I played you and hated it, it’d ruin my day.’
On himself:
I don’t know, it feels like I’m about to be a happy person and maybe even a sane person.
On songwriting:
People say albums are like kids, I never felt that way. I don’t have kids either. I never thought about songwriting as a precious thing.
On starting his career at 19:
I thought, ‘Wait, am I missing the fun? I thought I was broke, but Jerry Jeff says I’m free. Maybe this isn’t bad.’
On leaving his parents:
The summer we moved [to Oregon] I felt like I could see what was going on. My parents told me the economy was bad. I thought, ‘The economy is definitely going to be bad for everybody who does cocaine all night. Having multiple girlfriends and (expletive) will run up the tab. I don’t know if Jimmy Carter’s the reason we don’t have any money.’
On being careful for what you ask for:
Man, from the concert to the bus people want to hand you the biggest bags of drugs. It’s astonishing. So I wrote that if you wanted to throw something, throw flowers. I was trying to be funny, but the next time we played there were all these flowers. And then I couldn’t get free drugs on stage anymore, so it was a huge mistake.
[Image (CC) by Dave Hensley]
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