Todd Snider Returns to Cash Cabin for More Straight-Shooting Songs

Todd Snider is a force of nature. He’s a brilliant songwriter who’s always searching for the next chord, the next story, the next joke, the next idea, the next experience he can turn into song.

Back in 2015, Snider had been invited to Cash Cabin Studio to observe Loretta Lynn record a couple of songs they had co-written. A few days later he had a dream that he had fallen asleep in the middle of the floor at the cabin. He felt a nudge and looked up to see Johnny Cash standing over him. Snider had the same dream a few more times, and the final time Cash spoke to Snider, pointed to a corner of the cabin, and told Snider, “You’re missing it.” Snider returned to Cash Cabin later that year and over the next three years recorded both with Hard Working Americans and alone. The songs on Volume 3 feature Snider on guitar, harmonica, and banjo — he plays all the instruments on the album — and vocals.

“Talking Show Reality Blues” opens with a few harmonica runs before launching into a roving tale of the ways that television first shut out the world around us—it killed reality—before shaping that reality for us in insidious ways: “Then a show called the Apprentice came on and pretty soon / An old man with a combover came along and sold us the moon / And we stayed tuned in now here we are / Reality killed by a reality star.” The tale told in song recalls an earlier tale of destruction told in song, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice Restaurant.” On “The Blues on Banjo” Snider snatches up the banjo and rolls out a funky little acoustic blues tune that’s a tongue-in-cheek riposte to blues songs — “I woke up this morning / And I realized that I repeat myself” — as a well as a probing look at the state of our society — “I am just another working fucking schmuck / Out here standing around waiting to get shot / In yet another tragic addition to / An already sorry state of affairs / With yet another set of politicians / Taking to the top of another / Set of courthouse stairs.” Snider turns his knife in the souls of the politicians who are standing at the top of the courthouse stairs, out of ideas when it comes to another mass shooting, “sending out their thoughts and prayers.”

The haunting minor chord “The Ghost of Johnny Cash” tells a tale that John Carter Cash told Snider about seeing Loretta Lynn dancing early one morning outside the Cash Cabin: She told Carter Cash that she was dancing with his dad. A beautiful spare tune, “Cowboy Jack Clement’s Waltz,” celebrates the great musician and producer’s life and accomplishments: “Sharp as a tack piano key / This town will never be the same.”

Never afraid to call out the truth, Snider reveals the pernicious underbelly of our society in peripatetic tunes whose staccato rhythms at once belie the gravity of the topics and drum out the truth to everyone who listens. Todd Snider lives for songs, and delivers a set of wry, funny, satiric, straight-to-the-heart, honest-to-God, true-to-the bone tracks on Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3.