You Asked, Todd Answered, Part 8
The further adventures of readers’ questions and Todd Snider’s answers
By Daryl Sanders
In the eighth edition of “You Asked, Todd Answered,” Todd Snider discusses The Bottle Rockets, his performances on Austin City Limits, up-and-coming singer-songwriters he likes and super-colliding atoms, among other topics.
Tyler Kulsza: Any great Bottle Rockets or St. Louis stories to tell from your many times coming through town?
Todd: Yes. First, they were by a mile my favorite band in the ’90s, before I switched to Mayhem a few years ago. Norwegian church-burning metal is more my thing now, but that’s only because I’m really baked. Brian Henneman is one of my favorite songwriters by a mile. Our third album, we asked them to open for us. I knew we could have just as easily opened for them but we had an album out, and they were super cool about that. The first night we got together, we dubbed it the “Monsters of Tube Socks Tour,” and everything about that tour was fun — we still had so much energy. Robert Kearns from Sheryl Crow’s band was in the Rockets then. He is such a special human. Aside from being a great musician, he’s a true soul. One night me and Kearns were walking around Minneapolis before the show, the moon was full, the weather was good, the show was sold out, and I said to Robert, “What a great night to be alive.” And he said we had to sit down and let that soak in, and so we did. Man, we had a great night. I still see Robert all the time. That band moved me. All of them are good friends. The funnest tour I did in my whole life was with The Bottle Rockets. My god, that was our summer. We said “let’s get it on”to each other constantly. All of us, and wrote it on our clothes, but for me it was as free and wild as the road ever got — and the shows put the devil in the room every time.
Gabe Waters: I was listening to the Guy Clark live album recorded at Austin City Limits and drinking in the Southern heat because there just isn’t enough Guy Clark in this world. And that got me listening to Doug Sahm at ACL, and then I streamed your great 2012 show there with (Jason) Isbell, (Amanda) Shires and guest Jerry Jeff (Walker) and the 1996 show with Prine. If you could immortalize one of your ACL shows uncompressed which would it be? Got good stories from those shows?
Todd: Probably the one with Jason and Amanda. I bet that was a pretty good recording. I had more songs to choose from, and it was a really interesting time to be me. I also really liked the first one because the Joes and I’d had band for a couple years, but it wasn’t till I made that album that we could tour and my manager Lynsey McDonald suggested that I hire a guy I’d met named Will Kimbrough to be what a band with more pieces might call the musical director. For HWA, it was Neal. For Buffett, it was Mike Utley. And when Will joined, and we went on the road in a van for a year, I thought we got really good, and that was the final show of that tour. We surprised people I think.
Rick A: How much interaction from the audience do you like? I think a lot of us feel like we “know” you because we’ve spent so much time with your music and forums like this, but that’s not reality. How much shouting from the audience vs. quiet listening is the right balance from the SHC?
Todd: I don’t have a preference or a way that I am hoping people will act, including myself. For me with making songs and singing ’em, there’s a way to do this thing I call “shaking my name” and watching what happens to it. It’s like heroin to be frank. Do it once, and you’ll drive around forever trying to do it again — not heroin but the extended break from the brain and thought. And then with myself and all my friends, as we age we get there quicker and stay there longer. It’s not as mystical as it sounds, but yeah it is.
Darren Hadley: Who are some up-and-coming singer-songwriters/bands that you’ve been digging lately?
Todd: Josh Morningstar is a newer person who’s album just came out. I really like him. Lilly Winwood’s new album is really great. Lady Couch isn’t new but I dig them. Rachel Cole, as well.
Michael Frank: A lot of us dig your music first and foremost for all of its healing, feeling and laugh-out-loud squealing powers. But at the risk of gushing, I also have always thought your character shines through your performances and interviews as genuine as Coolio Iglesias — even though I’ve never had the chance to chat with you in person (unless you count a few shouted requests that you have sometimes indulged). My Italian friend’s 80-year-old dad has this saying in his dialect that basically means “ain’t life some bullshit” — la vida una stronzada or something like that. He even made me a T-shirt of it I liked it that much, which I wear in my happy moments on a boat on a lake. But I still have a tough time always living up to that motto as much as I know it’s true. Some shit just sucks, and we can’t always shrug it off. (And my day job is trying to figure out the brain motivation system — what causes us to care about shit. I even quoted “Easy Money” in a scientific paper about dopamine.) Somehow you seem to live that organically without effort. If there’s a question here maybe it’s just would you ever write a (satirical?) self-help piece to challenge you out of your no-preach comfort zone? Don’t get me wrong — I understand from afar that your MO isn’t always joints and flowers and JJW adventures, but still — OK, I guess I’m engaging in a self-help question to a self-denying guru who apologizes for preaching after simply telling your choir to never let a day go by. Anyways thanks for reading this far — feel free to ignore or make fun of the question.
Todd: A self-help book, eh? I like Coolio Iglesias — usually people call me Retardo Montalban. I don’t know if I think there is a way to make the most of the human condition. We don’t know what happens when we die, and that has been the cause of all our progress. We send our kids to school and give them all the information we have, and the only real reason we do it is because we hope one of those kids will figure out what we’re doing here. In my mind, life only begs one question: Is it serious? Humans have a rough go of it because we rose to the top of the food chain, and without a predator, we invented free time. We started cooking food and our brains grew, we came to understand death and set out to figure it out hundreds of years ago. There is an organization called CERN that spends more money than anybody, and they are trying to figure out what the fuck we are doing here. Forty some odd years they’ve been super-colliding atoms to figure out life, and they are not even one centimeter closer to an answer. In all the years we've tried to figure out what is happening, we’ve made no progress. We can’t even prove this is happening. What helps me is to remember why we have names and a society. We built all that trying to figure out why were here, and when it didn’t work, we thought that it at least distracted us from our doom. So now we go thru these motions of trying to make living something amazing, even though we all know the movie ends horrifically. For me the key is to remember that our “lives” aren’t happening. You ever see a bunch of birds on the beach, just sitting there in the sun? That’s all we’re doing. We don’t have names or histories, we don’t have duties as humans. We’re not here for a reason that we know of, we don’t know how we’re supposed to behave. I meditate a lot, smoke a ton of weed, listen to lots of reggae and try to remember that I am not Todd Snider any more than the geese in my yard. We don’t know why we’re here, so there isn’t a right way to do it. My thing is that I am not invested in the outcome of anything. I don’t have expectations or hopes or goals. I am not trying to be understood or respected by anyone — or trying to make the world a better place or be remembered any certain way. I’m trying to enjoy being alive. If I was going to give anybody self-help advice, it would be that sanity is a hoax and doesn’t exist in nature. It’s not something to strive for. So my self-help advice would be to stop resisting the urge to go bat-shit insane because it’s the correct response to being alive. If I could enjoy three days out of every 10, I’d have a hall of fame-level batting average, and who wouldn’t want to go to Cooperstown. If I was going to give anybody self-help advice, it would be that sanity is a hoax and doesn’t exist in nature. Madness is the only logical response to whatever this is. Stop resisting the urge to be absurd because whatever this is may be hoping we respond in kind. So there you go. Redrum, redrum, redrum.
© 2024 Daryl Sanders
Well, shit. I couldn’t have hoped for an answer even half as good as that
“We can’t even prove this is happening” sounds like my next tattoo. Or at least a t-shirt. It says pretty much everything I need to remember. I hope I’m coherent enough when I utter my last words to use them as my last words. Much better than, say, the bullshit Stonewall Jackson went out with: “Let us cross the river and rest in the shade of the trees.” He was dying but he couldn’t even prove it was happening. So there you go.