Todd Snider And Will Kimbrough – “If the melody is right, you can open your heart”

ND: You’re working a bunch of angles, as someone who relies on your own records, on gigs playing with others, and on songwriter cuts.

WK: It’s good. I got older and I need to work a lot. And I like to. I’m not thinking about that much stuff. I’m just trying to make sure I know where I’m supposed to be. It’s like any other time in my life where I’d be overwhelmed if I had to do a gig and hadn’t learned the songs yet.

It takes a little time to decompress, but I’ve learned to decompress quicker. I had a day off on the last tour with Rodney, and it felt like a week’s vacation. I can decompress quicker. I don’t work on the road with that many musicians anymore: Just Todd’s stuff, Rodney Crowell, Jimmy Buffett. It’s a great way to live if you’re suited for it, and I am. It’s normal to me.

If I really wound down…from here on out in my life, really winding down would be retiring or dying. I don’t want to wind down from making music, from making stuff up. That’s a release. Nights off are the hardest for me.

TS: A night off on the road? Ugh.

WK: It’s like being addicted to something that doesn’t hurt you. I don’t think it’s a drain. Or maybe I’m turning into a Stepford wife. Everything is fine!

ND: Will, your songs have so often been about relationships and internal struggles. How do you get from there to making the socio-political statements of Americanitis?

WK: I’ve always paid attention to stuff, voted and all that. But I tried to write songs about it, and I had to put ’em up against some good ones by people I knew, like Todd and Rodney. I had to figure out how to be comfortable.

You don’t want to be self-conscious while you do it. When I started doing this record, they were the most personal songs I’d ever written. That was what I was getting up in the morning and talking to my wife about. This election, it appears to possibly have been taken.

A lot of them, I wrote real fast. I don’t do the whole “Songs are my children” thing, because they’re not. Some of them do have a date to them. You want things to be timeless, but that’s something that comes later. You have to be passionate about what you do. I had to whittle it down, then whittle some more.

This record is real personal. It’s more what you talk about with your wife then what you think about your wife.

ND: Todd, most of us thought you were done writing your record, The Devil You Know, when you came in with “You Got Away With It (A Tale Of Two Fraternity Brothers)”, told from the point of view of one of George W. Bush’s frat buddies. I think just before you wrote it that you were saying you felt like you needed to make a comment on the times.

TS: Well, not just our times. I felt like any time in the history of the United States there’s a person like myself who’s going to feel like the president’s a bully. Maybe a different president, maybe a different kind of bully. But I do feel like a bully is in charge of me, today.

I was trying to express that, and wanting to do it in a way that could be like a Nanci Griffith song, just be a story-song if you want to zone out on what year it was. And I was trying to do it in as placid a way as I could. But it’s funny, ’cause I played the song in Reno and they got mad. I was trying to be just flat water, you know? I have a song called “Conservative Christian, Right Wing Republican, Straight White American Male”, and I thought that song was saying, “If you vote for Bush, I disagree with you, brother. But they’re still selling beer at my shows.”

Also, I love Shel Silverstein and Bobby Bare and Jerry Jeff, and those are people who showed me story-songs are cool if it’s a good story, no matter what the message is. So that frat brother song is a story-song. And doesn’t it feel like these are political times?

And what no one ever brings up is all the other hippies that were there at the show, heard the song about Bush and the frat brother, and went and got nine more of their friends to come to the next show. Everyone is like, “What about the Republican that came to see you but isn’t coming back?” Well, that’s cool. Remember the Phish fan that came that’s bringing fifteen people with him last time, ’cause you went all the way off the cliff instead of singing about your old lady?

WK: Also, that song of Todd’s is a good song. It’s like the medicine with the sugar. You want to tell a story or give them a melody that makes them listen. You want people to enjoy the stuff and tap their foot and say, “Peace is good, war is bad,” and if they say it enough times maybe they’ll start to believe it.

I didn’t want to put out these songs without believing in them, and also knowing I’ll have to argue with people about them. But I know I’ve gone out and given them the personal shit, and whatever people think, they think. I think any artist would have to admit that they think, “If I’m doing this and it’s too uncomfortable for me to deliver, nobody’s going to listen to it long enough to understand.”

Lately, I’ve been putting the Lennon aside and listening to the McCartney. He’s so joyous about what he comes up with musically. Any kid who gets into the back seat of my car will listen to “Hands Across The Water” all the way through. I believe in music bringing you joy, just on its own, no matter the message.

TS: What you just said, that’s your key to being blunter than other people get to be.