Todd Snider Comes to Columbus, 3/12

Celebrated American singer/songwriter Todd Snider is now touring in support of his 12th album, Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables. Deemed "America's sharpest musical storyteller" by Rolling Stone, Snider uses his Americana/alternative country/folk style to paint a world where begging turns to mugging, investment turns to ruin, babies grow into felons, and honesty is blunt trauma. The result is something disconcerting, cracked, and wholly original.

CAPA presents Todd Snider with special guest Chicago Farmer at the Southern Theatre (21 E. Main St.) on Tuesday, March 12, at 8pm. Tickets are $25 at the CAPA Ticket Center (39 E. State St.), all Ticketmaster outlets, and www.ticketmaster.com. To purchase tickets by phone, please call (614) 469-0939 or (800) 745-3000. Young people aged 13-25 may purchase $5 PNC Arts Alive All Access tickets while available. For more information, visit www.GoFor5.com.

"This record doesn't come from good times," Snider says. "I wanted to sound the way I feel, which sometimes means sounding like a broken soul."

He might carry the mantle of "storyteller," but Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables is anything but a nice, folk/Americana, troubadour album. It's jagged, leering, lurching, howling, and filled with unhappy endings both experienced and intimated-"It ain't the despair that gets you, it's the hope," he sings in the album-closer, "Big Finish."

That the album is also roaringly funny is a tribute to Snider's unique sensibilities and to his standing as what Rolling Stone Magazine calls "America's sharpest musical storyteller." Anguish without laughter is boring, like intensive care without morphine, and Snider has never been within 100 miles of boring.

At album's outset ("In The Beginning"), Snider credits the church with sustaining peace by noting that "We still need religion to keep the poor from killing the rich." From there, it's on to the certainty of warped karma ("Good things happen to bad people," he sings in "New York Banker"), to a remarkable reworking of "West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown" (possibly the album's most acerbic song, and from the pen of Jimmy Buffett), and a slew of stories inspired by the world at large, writ small and barbed, in a manner both penetrating and empathetic. There's one happy love song called "Brenda," about Snider's favorite couple, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.

Musically, Snider and co-producer Eric McConnell sought a sound that mirrored the times and didn't replicate anything they'd done together. With McConnell on bass and Snider playing guitar and harmonica, they gathered a core band of percussionist Paul Griffith, violinist/vocalist (and gifted songwriter) Amanda Shires, and keyboard player Chad Staehly, along with guest guitarist Jason Isbell and harmony vocalist Mick Utley. Shires' violin is the call-and-response heroine to Snider's lyrics. Meanwhile, Griffith makes like some off-kilter offspring of Keith Moon and Zigaboo Modeliste while Snider's guitar plays lead switchblade.

The result is something that stands apart from the music of Snider's heroes, and from his own, much-celebrated past. Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables is Snider's 12th album (14th, if we count a "best of" set and a collection of b-sides and demos), and it uses its predecessors not as a compass but as a trampoline for different song forms, inspirations, and means of expression.

www.ToddSnider.net

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