Todd Snider at Iron City on January 26th, 2020 Cash Cabin Sessions,
Vol. 3 One morning near the end of August, Todd Snider was relaxing
with a visitor on the back porch of his house just outside Nashville,
drinking coffee and shooting the breeze while his dog, Cowboy Jim,
took a nap nearby. After awhile, Snider said to his guest, "I've got
an album's worth of songs, and I think the songs are telling me to
make a folk record." This was a surprising bit of news considering he
had spent the last six years making rock albums of one kind or
another. But Snider was feeling as if he had "maybe drifted too far
from the shore." He was feeling the pull to start over, to go back to
what he was doing when he first began, to return to his roots as a
folksinger. If Snider needed any further evidence that was the
direction he should pursue, he got it a half hour later. Back inside
his home office, he checked his email and had one from his manager
informing him he had just received an offer to play the 2019 Newport
Folk Festival, an event he had never done. Snider mentioned he had
been listening to Woody Guthrie's Library of Congress Recordings, then
crossed the room to the turntable and put the needle down on side one
of the record. "Woody Guthrie sometimes gets me reset on why you do a
song, instead of how," Snider explains of the man who has long been a
touchstone for him. "When I was young, there was something about him
that made me want to do it. So once or twice a year, I'll go back to
him, I'll go back to the source." Guthrie famously had the words "This
machine kills fascists" printed on his guitar, and on several of the
songs on Snider's new album, Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3, he squarely
aims his guitar at the creeping fascism he sees in America. He had
been wanting to make a political record since 2016, and although only
half the songs lean in that direction, there is one constant
throughout the album: a man, his guitar, and the truth. * * * * *
Snider has long been recognized as one of his generation's most gifted
and engaging songwriters, so it's no surprise he has returned with a
brilliant set of songs -- and make no mistake, Cash Cabin Sessions,
Vol. 3 contains some of his best work as a writer. But what really
jumps out on the album is Snider's growth as a musician and vocalist.
He plays all the instruments on the record, and his guitar work and
harmonica playing are nothing short of exceptional; not only full of
feeling, but highly skilled. In regards to his guitar playing on the
record, Snider says he wanted to take everything he's learned over the
past 30 years and play the way he used to play really well. As far as
his vocals on the album are concerned, Snider is singing with more
confidence than ever, a confidence born in part from his time with
Hard Working Americans doing nothing but sing. His stirring vocal
performances range from slurring blues mumble to Dylanesque talking
blues to gravely, honest ache. Of the five songs on which Snider
serves up his humorous brand of socio-political commentary, three are
performed in the talking blues style: "Talking Reality Television
Blues," a hilariously accurate short history of television; "The Blues
on Banjo," a bad case of the blues caused by the sorry state of
everything from the crooked international monetary-military-industrial
complex to the spineless politicians who serve it and which references
"Blue Suede Shoes," Richard Lewis, and Townes Van Zandt; and "A
Timeless Response to Current Events," a brilliant bit of wordplay on
which he calls bullshit on faux patriotism, crooked capitalism, and
lying politicians. Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires contributed backing
vocals on the latter two songs. There are two other songs on the album
featuring Snider's socio-political points of view: "Just Like
Overnight," about the surprising inevitability of change, and
"Framed," written from the point of view of the framed "first dollar
bill" in a bar, a point of view that shows doing the right thing
doesn't pay. There also are three songs with a music theme. If not for
the events that led to the writing of one of those songs,"The Ghost of
Johnny Cash," there almost certainly would be no Cash Cabin Sessions,
Vol. 3. After a visit to Cash Cabin Studio for a Loretta Lynn session
in 2015 where she recorded a song they cowrote, Snider began having a
recurring dream about the studio that featured the Man in Black
himself. The dream led him to book time at the studio and ultimately
inspired him to write "The Ghost of Johnny Cash," which tells the
story of Loretta Lynn dancing with Cash's ghost outside the studio in
the middle of the night. As he did on much of the record, Snider
played the century-old Martin that had long been Johnny Cash's
favorite instrument on that song. Snider paid tribute to Cash's
longtime friend and confidante in another of the music-themed songs,
"Cowboy Jack Clement's Waltz." Inspired by the iconic record man's
oft-quoted maxims regarding the art of recording, the song achingly
laments Clement's passing, while touchingly celebrating his legacy.
The album opens with the other song with a music theme, "Working on a
Song." It's an existential exercise, a song Snider wrote about writing
a song called "Where Do I Go Now That I'm Gone," an idea he actually
has been working on for thirty years, but which remains unfinished.
There are also two songs that are personal in nature: "Watering
Flowers in the Rain," which was inspired by a former associate of
Snider's whose nickname was "Elvis," and "Like a Force of Nature," a
philosophical reflection on the orbital nature of friendships. Isbell
also added harmony vocals to "Like a Force of Nature." If Snider is
anything, he is a true artist, and he reminds us of that on Cash Cabin
Sessions, Vol. 3. At a point in time when the world has never been
more complicated and confusing, with people getting louder and louder,
Snider did a 180, went back to his roots as a folksinger, to a
simpler, quieter form of expression; and it might be what the world is
waiting to hear: just a man, his guitar, and the truth.
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28/01/2020 Last update