ALBUM REVIEW: Todd Snider’s ‘Best of All My Songs’ is Just That

After two years when health problems prevented his performing, fans of Todd Snider can look forward to the release of Best of All My Songs, a six-vinyl-album box set offering a retrospective on his thirty-year career. In 2014, Snider published I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like: Mostly True Tall Tales, a memoir in need of a sound track. Ten years later, this collection promises to be just that.

Best of All My Songs is composed of songs from Snider’s livestreams during the pandemic. In 2020, he recorded acoustic performances of 12 albums—one every weekend from October through December—at The Purple Building in East Nashville, relating stories from the road that gave the songs life.

As Snider played through the records, he acknowledged that some resonate more than others. He was candid about the songs he no longer appreciated. For the box set, he winnowed down to 49 songs he considered his best, although, he acknowledges, “best is a weird word because it’s in the ear of the beholder.”

Not surprisingly, more songs from the later albums—Happy to Be Here, New Connections, and East Nashville Skyline—made the cut. The songs he chose are those he says he could play again and again. They include many fan favorites as well, including “Beer Run,” “Devil’s Backbone Tavern,” and “Alright Guy.”

Through the stories, Snider gives listeners his unique perspective not just on his life but on his creative process and his growth as a songwriter: “If I sing a story song it’s because I lived it,” Snider says.

Introducing “Highland Street Incident,” Snider explains how he took the experience of his first mugging and made it a song by considering the perspective of his inept muggers. “I wanted to know what they were thinking because what I was thinking didn’t rhyme,” he says.

One of Snider’s best lessons came from John Prine. “When I first started working with John, I gave him 13 songs, and he said one of them was really good.” Based on Prine’s advice, Snider included a detail about his dad in his song “D.B. Cooper,” which wasn’t in the song at first. “It’s funny because it makes people like the song more. John was teaching me how to take a song and make it be something—something I could play 100 nights in a row and not hate it, not be mad at it,” he says.

As he looks back over his three-decade career, Todd Snider seems incredulous at his good fortune. “When I was 18…I knew one chord, and I could get food with that thing,” he says. Born to be a gypsy, Snider entered a bigger world through music. He went from busking to being invited inside to play, where he met music people who invited him into their worlds.

But Snider says, “I could go throw my hat back on the ground and get just as much good tonight.” After thirty years playing up to 200 shows a year, he says he sometimes dreams of playing cover songs in bars where no one knows him.

At his core, Snider simply loves music. He decided at 19 he was born for a troubadour’s life after seeing Jerry Jeff Walker play to crowd of five or six hundred people. Walker’s influence is evident in Snider’s music, as well as his troubadour life.

As music became his passion, Snider says, he didn’t just do it; he studied it: “I love art. I work six hours a day on lyrics and poems. I always have—even before I made songs.” He found role models that included Walker and Prine, as well as Kris Kristofferson, Keith Sykes, Guy Clark and more—and they all pointed him to Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, the original troubadour.

According to Snider, “[these musicians] were a secret handshake group of people that had figured out how much adventure you could get and you could live like a king, if you had a guitar and you didn’t have to be a star.” To him, their motto was “seek adventure and report back.”

Snider’s Best of All My Songs lives up to that motto. A digital companion to the set will be available on all streaming services on Dec. 13, the same day of the box set’s release.

Todd Snider’s Best of All My Songs releases Dec. 13.