Review: 'Aimless Records Presents: Happy To Be Here (Purple Version)’

The fourth release in Todd Snider’s ‘All My Songs’ series

By Daryl Sanders

Over consecutive Sundays in fall 2020, one per week, Todd Snider recorded live versions of his 14 studio albums, which are now being released as part of Aimless Records’ “All My Songs” series of live albums. The recordings from the third and fourth Sundays of that stretch captured Snider in performances just days after losing not one, but two of his mentors.

When he recreated Viva Satellite at the Purple Building on October 25, 2020, Snider had just lost Jerry Jeff Walker two days earlier. Then as if that was not enough of a gut punch, on October 28 Billy Joe Shaver passed just three days before Snider recorded the just-released live performance of Happy To Be Here, which you can download here. You can hear that Snider has a heavy heart on the Purple Version of both albums.

On Happy To Be Here (Purple Version), Snider understandably sounds weary at the start of the record, his voice raspier than usual. Rather than diminish his performance, Snider’s vulnerability make the performances on this record even more endearing.

Although I ranked Happy To Be Here number 11 out of Snider’s 14 studio albums in “Todd Snider’s Studio Albums Ranked,” the Purple Version of the album is a reminder that it was a pivotal record in his career. It was his first album for John Prine’s Oh Boy label, and as he explains as he introduces the opening/title track, “This began a period where I would start to figure out not necessarily how to make up songs that people were going to like, but how to make up songs that I was gonna like in a year or two.”

What has made this series of live albums so wonderful and historically important are the stories Snider shares during the performances, most of which are not the kind of stories he tells in concert. Snider instead goes into the genesis of the songs, and when he does retell a familiar story, such as he does here in the introduction to “Ballad of the Devil's Backbone Tavern,” he adds new details.

Snider starts the album with the story previously reported by The Snider Files (“On This Day In Stoner Yodel History: April 18”) of how he turned in 17 songs to Oh Boy to be considered for his first record for the label, and then got the unexpected word Prine thought he only had two songs.

Snider responded to that challenge from one of the world’s greatest songwriters by going back to work. He rewrote some of the 17 songs he’d submitted, revived some older material and wrote some new songs to assemble the baker’s dozen that appeared on Happy To Be Here.

In addition to shedding light on the inspiration for the material, Snider also talks about producer Ray Kennedy and the contributions he made to the original studio recording, especially noting the producer’s contributions to the songs’ arrangements. He also shares memories of the sessions at Kennedy’s studio, such as working with trumpeter Wayne Jackson of the Memphis Horns and bassist Joey Spampinato of NRBQ.

As he did on the Purple version of Viva, Snider gives several shout-outs to his longtime musical collaborator Will Kimbrough, as well as Kimbrough's bandmate in the Bis-quits, Tommy Womack. Womack wrote the one cover Snider recorded for Happy To Be Here, “Betty Was Black (And Willie Was White),” which first appeared on the Bis-quits’ only album released by Oh Boy in 1993. He also credits his former wife Melita Osheowitz for recognizing there was a song in his childhood memories of D.B. Cooper and explains how he came to write “Lonely Girl,” on which he plays some inspired harmonica, about her.

Snider was on top of his game when he made the live recordings in the “All My Songs” series, and despite being rocked by the loss of both Walker and Shaver in just over a week’s time, his performances on Happy To Be Here (Purple Version) are no exception. Even though he sounds a little down at the start of the record, by the time he gets the guitar groove going for “45 Miles,” he shakes off the heartache and emotions of the previous 10 days and quickly warms to revisiting the album’s material, which was the most complete collection of songs he had released at that point in his career.

© 2024 Daryl Sanders