Todd Snider’s Gothic Masterpiece “Train Song”

“Sing a Train Song”: this deft and touching tune by one of East Nashville’s finest – or maybe its finest – is easy to hear as a familiar trope; train songs abound in American music for good reason. But in this song, trains do more than usual, as a clever foil for Snider’s deep characterizations and delightful genre-play.

Yes it’s about trains, but it’s really about a man who loves train songs, and why. And about a narrator who explains this man (and himself) through the vocabulary of the train-song genre. Neither of them even mentions hopping a train. Take a listen: 

So we have trains, train songs, a man who loves them, the narrator who describes him – lotsa layers. But we listeners form an extra outer layer in a way I see as gothic in the literary sense. Let’s look at a few lines before I explain that.

 

A smokin’, long black Cadillac; the engine’s winding down

He parked it up on the sidewalk like he owned the whole damn town.

I saw him talking to some chick through a thick ghost of smoke,

Through a thicker haze of Southern Comfort and Coke.

“Say girl you’re hotter than the hinges hanging off the gates of hell.

Don’ be afraid to turn to me, babe, if he don’t treat you well. “

And by he, he meant me, so I laughed and I shook his hand.

 

The narrator starts by describing a single entertaining event as it quickly unfolds: sidewalk, car, smoke, booze, chick, come-on, handshake – and then suddenly, as if the camera were panning, we’re in the bar and this evocative characterization ends with:

 

He laughed a little bit louder as he yelled up at the band.

 

And then chorus, verse, chorus:

 

Play a train song, pour me one more round.

Make ’em leave my boots on; on the day they lay me down.

I am a runaway locomotive, out of my one-track mind.

Play a train song. Play a train song.

I got this old black leather jacket. Got this pack of Marlboro reds.

Got this stash here in my pocket. Got these thoughts in my own head.

I’m gonna run until I have to walk, until I have to crawl.

Got this moment that I’m living in and nothing else at all.

Play a train song, pour me one more round.

Make ’em leave my boots on; on the day they lay me down.

I am a runaway locomotive, out of my one-track mind.

Play a train song. Play a train song.

 

A single long quote from the man himself. But unlike the first two verses, it’s without context: We don’t assume the narrator heard this right then in the bar. We can imagine the man saying it – or parts of it – anywhere, anytime, and probably again and again. It’s as if now the camera is still, like a train momentarily stopped for a passenger to disembark and reveal himself.

 

But suddenly it’s in motion again, completing its pan, as the narrator finds his now-good friend dead.

In the television blizzard lights, we looked around his place.

A little cold there on the sofa, a little smile across his face.

 

And Snider further evolves his narrative when he offers the narrator’s first explicit analysis of his friend. Until now he’s only implied his impressions by word choices like “whole damn town” and events like “so I laughed and I shook his hand.” But here he goes deep:

 

And though I tried with all of my sadness, somehow I just could not weep

For a man who looked to me like he died laughin’ in his sleep.

 

You don’t construct a song with these nuances in point of view unless you understand that a good song is a good short story.

And so it is with the final chorus. Here the narrator again quotes his friend, but this time bends it to his own point of view. The friend is gone ­– but now he’s fully inside the narrator.

 

Singing a train song, pour him one last round

Made ’em leave his boots on on the day they laid him down.

He was a runaway locomotive, out of his one-track mind.

Play a train song… 

 

What a difference from the first chorus!

So over the course of the tune, we’ve followed a friendship from start to finish. The focal point is always the train-song-loving man, but the backdrop changes constantly with the narrative’s panning; and with it the narrator changes, too, under the influence of this locomotive personality. Truly, it’s as if the narrator (and we with him) are watching a train approach, pause and depart, and are forever changed.

And isn’t that the implication of the first stanza? Here it is again:

 

A smokin’, long black Cadillac; the engine’s winding down

He parked it up on the sidewalk like he owned the whole damn town.

I saw him talking to some chick through a thick ghost of smoke,

Through a thicker haze of Southern Comfort and Coke.

 

The man doesn’t just love train songs: he IS a train and he IS a train song. The metaphor doesn’t end until “Southern Comfort and Coke” (or maybe just “Comfort and Coke,” since “Southern” is in the name of many a great train) and no sooner. And that’s Snider’s writerly gift: in one phrase, “Southern Comfort and Coke,” he augments the metaphor and sets up and the next stage of his narrative, the bar scene.

So how is any of this gothic? This is a loose analysis, but stick with me. Stephen King’s The Shining (book and movie) is a gothic tale, and so is the 1978 movie “Burnt Offerings,” (which is sadly not a cult classic even though it features Betty Davis’ ghastly last screen appearance, Englishman Oliver Reed at his most burdened, horror queen Karen Black (truly hotter than the hinges … ), a terrific turn by Burgess Meredith (whose first appearance hews to his familiar charming/crusty-character role but whose last is pure gothic shock), and arguably the creepiest hearse driver ever, who appears in Reed’s dreams and suggests to me a comment on repressed guilt about British complicity with the Nazis before they woke up. But I digress with the self-indulgence of those who write for free).

These stories are gothic because they involve hauntings and possession, psychological tension and surprises, mystery, madness, death, sex (yes, like Washington D.C., but that’s not my point) and a plot that sorts itself out shockingly but logically at the end.

And so is “Sing A Train Song.” Like the characters in those stories and their unorthodox rented mansions, our narrator is at first put off by his protagonist but eventually is possessed in a way.

Along the way there’s a kind of obsessive madness, a hint of sex, always a sense of perceived mystery, a narrative that circles back as it evolves, and a death that feels like a sacrifice, in that the man has sacrificed himself to his own possessed nature and has left our narrator, like Burgess Meredith in “Burnt Offerings,” somehow nourished but not quite inclined to tears, because both know that haunting and death are in the nature of things.

And for that outer layer I mentioned? In gothic tales, there’s irony in that we understand the haunting before the characters do, and yet another layer when the shocking ending proves how little we knew. Similarly, in our song I see us allowing ourselves to grow fond of the train-song man right along with the narrator, and so his death is a shock to us. But not really to the narrator. Like the landlord in a gothic tale, he seems to have seen death coming all along.

If my gothic reading doesn’t hold up for you, we can still say this: the song encourages analysis because it’s masterful: in the drawing of character, in the use of point of view, in the narrator’s own subtle evolution, in its narrative pacing (like a train), and in its agile use of literary devices (like the train metaphor and train-song genre-bending).

And simply in its way with words. “And by he, he meant me, so I laughed and I shook his hand” sounds like good Arlo Guthrie to me, and it releases all the tension that began with the narrator’s first resentful impression. And “He laughed a little bit louder” is six words that say a ton about the man (he’s subtle as a freight train, in the same endearing way), about our narrator (he’s now charmed) and about us (relieved of tension, we’ve now bought our ticket on their ride).

From its first heralding whistle to its last, doleful one, a train never gives up its mass and only grudgingly its momentum. So too this song, a song about a man who so loved train songs that he inspired a kind of train song. With gothic elements. After all, doesn’t “long black Cadillac” suggest a hearse? This Todd Snider knows what he’s doing.

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