This is just an excerpt from a much longer article. But I like what he says and how he says it (love his music, too, if you’ve read here very long you probably know that)

One of the brightest and best voices of the Americana music scene is Todd Snider, a sharp-witted singer-songwriter who wears quite a few of his core beliefs on his sleeve: a commitment to progressive causes, a deep mistrust of materialism and greed, a sympathy for the downtrodden and a relentless Christian faith that leaves him bewildered at the way people of his own faith are acting in America.

Snider told Chris Willman in Willman’s excellent book Rednecks & Bluenecks:

I’m a Christian, but I must’ve got a defective Bible or something. Mine didn’t tell me to change anybody, or tell me to hunt and destroy all sin. Mine said forgiveness was the most important thing there was and pride was the worst. Mine said if someone takes your shirt, give them your coat. Mine said it was easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle on a camel’s back that it is for him to enter the gates of heaven. Passing through the eye of a needle on a camel’s back is the American dream.

As his career progresses, Snider has mined this concept for some great music. His best songs confront the confusion of being a progressive Christian in America, where your president says Jesus is his favorite philosopher as he favors the wealthiest in his economic policies and embraces a doctrine of pre-emptive war.

Found here.

The full article is below the fold, or click here.

As country became America’s favorite musical format in the late 80’s and early 90’s, a curious shift happened in terms of the content of the hits dominating radio. In previous generations, the stories of the poor and the working-class had always been embedded in the format. This was true from artists on all ends of the political spectrum, be it conservative (Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December”) or liberal (Johnny Cash’s “Man In Black”). Once country music became the favorite format of American suburbs, stories of the downtrodden mostly disappeared from the mainstream of country music, but they didn’t go away. We just started calling those songs, and the artists who sing them, Americana.

One of the brightest and best voices of the Americana music scene is Todd Snider, a sharp-witted singer-songwriter who wears quite a few of his core beliefs on his sleeve: a commitment to progressive causes, a deep mistrust of materialism and greed, a sympathy for the downtrodden and a relentless Christian faith that leaves him bewildered at the way people of his own faith are acting in America.

Snider told Chris Willman in Willman’s excellent book Rednecks & Bluenecks:

I’m a Christian, but I must’ve got a defective Bible or something. Mine didn’t tell me to change anybody, or tell me to hunt and destroy all sin. Mine said forgiveness was the most important thing there was and pride was the worst. Mine said if someone takes your shirt, give them your coat. Mine said it was easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle on a camel’s back that it is for him to enter the gates of heaven. Passing through the eye of a needle on a camel’s back is the American dream.

As his career progresses, Snider has mined this concept for some great music. His best songs confront the confusion of being a progressive Christian in America, where your president says Jesus is his favorite philosopher as he favors the wealthiest in his economic policies and embraces a doctrine of pre-emptive war. In his scathing “The Ballad of the Kingsmen”, Snider rejects those who claim it is music and media that is causing kids to turn violent:

You know, every ten years or so our country and some other little country,
We start firing all of our newest weapons at each other.
For some reason or another, right or wrong,
Like it or not, it happens, and when it happens
People get shot and when people get shot,
They show it on TV a lot, every night at six o clock

And you don’t even have to be eighteen to see it.
You don’t even have to be in first grade,
First grade where they teach the kid pride they tell him he’ll need to thrive,
In a world where only the strong will survive,
So he’s taught the art of more
To compare to and to keep score
Monday thru Friday while he stares at the floor

Til Sunday they make him go to school once more
Only this time they make him wear a suit and a tie
And listen to some guy who claims to know where people go when they die
Tell him that only the meek are gonna inherit the earth
Well shit, by this time the kid doesn’t know what anything is worth.

On his most recent album, The Devil You Know, which is available now digitally but won’t be available as a compact disc until August 18, he further mines this vein of thought in the album’s closer, “Happy New Year”, which uses humor and keen observation to connect this current dichotomy in our own society to one that has existed throughout history:

There’s an overweight man with an overweight woman on the sofa watching TV
He’s yelling his opinion at the television, she looks up from her food and agrees.
They got two bumper stickers on their pickup truck, they keep the pickup parked outside.
One sticker says “What Would Jesus Do?”, the other bumper sticker says “Power of Pride.”…

Now back to the lecture at hand, it seems my neighbor wants to kill what he can’t understand.
I say, “We can’t just kill what we don’t understand.”
But I turn on my TV and see, oh yeah we can.
We can and we have since the dawn of man
For countless gods whose only real seeming plan
Was to see to it that clinging to life was our fate
And ya gotta admit, life’s pretty great
But…can we deny that it’s killing us?

Snider can get bitingly political, as he does in “Conservative Christian, Right-Wing Republican, Straight White American Males”, which skewers stereotypical believers on both left and right, and in the snarky “You Got Away With It (A Tale of Two Frat Brothers)”, which skewers Bush from the perspective of a fictional fraternity buddy from his youth.

But Snider is most effective when he paints a bigger picture, as he does with the stunning “This Land Is Our Land”, which makes the case that America’s greatest sin in our treatment of Native Americans wasn’t just taking the land, but what we chose to do with it:

Hey, Redman don’t waste our time,
We’re young and strong, we got hills to climb,
There’s a lot of room but we need it all
For slave trade and shopping malls,
Gonna build big factories with paper plates and plastic trees
Styrofoam and antifreeze.
This land is our land.

Snider’s music carries on the tradition of Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash, literate singer-songwriters who gave voice to the downtrodden and were unafraid to sing from the perspective of even the most violent criminals. It’s easy to imagine Cash himself recording Snider’s “Broke”, which details how a young guy regains his pride after the embarrassment of having his credit card declined:

Credit complications in the checkout line
It’s an awkward situation almost every time
They keep your card behind, and they keep your groceries too
You try telling everybody it’s a terrible mistake
But you can tell they don’t believe that’s true
It’s written all over you when you’re broke.

By the time I got home, I was seeing red
I pulled the gun up out from under my bed
I put the sock on my head, and into the night I flew
The next thing I know I got blood on my hands
But I’ve got money in my pocket, too
You never know what you’ll do
Till you do what you do when you’re broke.

It’s the type of song that could’ve been a big hit in the sixties or seventies, but would never fly on commercial radio today. Snider has a theory on why this type of music no longer co-exists on hillbilly radio with the love songs and odes to family, and he shared it with Willman:

Rednecks and hippies don’t mingle like they used to back in Willie’s day. I blame Garth Brooks. To me, seventies outlaw country was the last batch of cowboy liberals…Garth came along with a head full of marketing savvy, and was willing to push so many easy buttons that anyone not willing to play the Republican American family-values routine was forever relegated to the four-hundred-seater circuit. Garth’s willingness to be a shill first undercut everyone in country who didn’t want to be a shill at all…He lowered the bar for how subtle or “artistic” you could be, and liberal people flee from s— that feels more like product than art. I think he scattered the hippies.

Snider may be exaggerating a bit, but he’s right that country has been less accepting of left-of-center music in the post-Garth era. But new ways of distributing music are helping artists find their way around radio, and the recent success of artists like Johnny Cash, Dixie Chicks, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Nickel Creek and many others has been accomplished without radio. If an outlaw renaissance truly occurs, one can imagine Todd Snider leading the way.

Essential Recordings:

Songs For The Daily Planet (1994)
Step Right Up (1996)
Happy To Be Here (2000)
Near Truths & Hotel Rooms Live (2002)
East Nashville Skyline (2004)
The Devil You Know (2006)