You didn’t want to throw your fishing line in that old main stream
By 
The brilliant singer-songwriter Todd Snider died Friday at age 59:
Todd Snider, a singer, songwriter, and raconteur who helped shape the alt-country and Americana music movements, died Friday. He was 59. Rolling Stone confirmed Snider’s death. No cause of death was given, but Snider reportedly was diagnosed with pneumonia this week.
“Aimless, Inc. Headquarters is heartbroken to share that our Founder, our Folk Hero, our Poet of the World, our Vice President of the Abrupt Change Dept., the Storyteller, our beloved Todd Daniel Snider has departed this world,” a message read on Snider’s Facebook page.
Born in Portland, Oregon, and relocating to northern California after high school, Snider rambled his way to Texas in the 1980s, where he met and was mentored by the songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker. In the Nineties, he migrated to Nashville, becoming a key figure in the rough-edged East Nashville scene. His 2004 album East Nashville Skyline is considered essential to the alt-country catalog.
“I’ve always been into being a troubadour. I love the chaos, that life of adventure — that’s what struck me. I had a predisposition for it,” Snider told Rolling Stone in 2023. “I was a hitchhiker and sofa circuit person. Jerry Jeff made me see that the difference between a free spirit and a freeloader is three chords on the guitar.”
Along with Walker, Snider befriended and learned from songwriting greats like Billy Joe Shaver, John Prine, Jimmy Buffett, Guy Clark, and Kris
Kristofferson. “Nobody’s ever deserved there to be a heaven more than John Prine,” Snider told Rolling Stone in 2020 following the singer-songwriter’s death. “And if there’s not a heaven, they oughta get one together pretty quick, because John’s coming.”
The loss of each of those guiding lights for Snider (Walker died six months after Prine) shook the musician — “I sing about dead friends more than girls these days,” he said in the press materials for what would be his last album, 2025’s High, Lonesome and Then Some. But they also left him as the flag-bearer for a certain type of songwriting, one informed by lived experiences, both good and bad, and plainspoken, honest lyricism.
I saw him several times and he was always great (with this show being a particular highlight.) And while I would start with East Nashville Skyline or The Devil You Know, his live albums do give a pretty good sense of what his shows were like. I’m very sad that I won’t be able to see him again. Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think. R.I.P.