Todd Snider – New Connection

No two ways about it: Todd Snider is one of those singers whose concerts leave his recordings in the dust. Funny, smart, charming as hell — the ideal stage performer. That said, Snider’s fifth album is still 40-odd minutes of fine music, shrewd insights and compelling stories.

Like his last release, Happy To Be Here, Snider’s latest combines dispatches from the battlefield of his own heart with tales from the square-wheeled world of life’s outsiders. (That heart and that world are frequently one and the same, when you get right down to it.) Hometown memories, the career progression of a minor-league criminal, intimations of mortality at a class reunion — Snider, like his mentor Prine, roots around in small events and prods ordinary people until they yield simple, startling truths.

At his sardonic best (“Statistician’s Blues”), Snider unearths a treasure trove of human foibles, not the least of which is our presumption that we can reduce the world to rational exposition, a world that, in other songs, offers beauty, misery and hare-brained fun beyond measurement. Small wonder that Snider confesses to being perpetually “Stuck between hope and doubt/It’s too much to think about.”

Folksy rock, a flash of Dixieland and a little Southern soul provide the backdrop for Snider’s voice, a creaky, idiosyncratic instrument if there ever was one, brimming with resilience, fragility and self-knowledge.