THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Todd Snider’s Live: Return Of The Storyteller contains a new collection of songs and stories captured during his first performances after venues opened back up last year.
In addition to performing material that spanned his career — from his 1994 debut album Songs From The Daily Planet through 2021’s First Agnostic Church Of Hope And Wonder — Snider uses much of his time paying homage to friends gone too soon including John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker, Neal Casal and Colonel Bruce Hampton. But typical of a Snider live show, his stage banter also veers into one-of-a-kind road tales like conversing with haunted ghost children in California, raising hell with the inventor of Crocs in Montana and misadventures in the woods behind Johnny Cash’s house in Tennessee.
A successor in spirit to the Nashville troubadour’s 2011 collection Live: The Storyteller — which found earned praise for his “perfect timing, mastery of tiny details and sharply funny, lyrical songs” — the album was recorded between August and December of 2021 on stages across the United States. Musically it finds Snider reimagining a diverse array of material, adapting songs from his output with jam supergroup Hard Working Americans into folk-troubadour style, or channeling recent funk-inspired writing through inspiration from Jimmy Reed.
Snider says: “This album is dedicated to all the people who come to these shows. Whether this last tour was the first one you caught, you’ve been coming since ’94, or you joined the family somewhere in between, you have my undying gratitude. Traveling and singing has been the great joy of my life
and it’s not lost on me who makes it possible. Thank you.”
