EDITOR'S NOTE: This feature originally appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of No Depression and we're sharing it now in honor of Todd Snider's new album, HIGH, LONESOME AND THEN SOME, which is due out on October 17 via Aimless Records / Thirty Tigers. This is Snider's first studio album since 2023, and comes after treatments for spinal stenosis that have kept him off the road since 2022.
There’s a line on Nashville-based troubadour Todd Snider’s new live album where he tells the crowd, “I went on tour in ’94 and we didn’t stop until the pandemic. This is my second tour!”
He offers a dry little laugh as the audience goes wild.
“I never stopped gettin’ into chasin’ songs around,” he says before launching into “Working on a Song” from 2019’s Cash Cabin Sessions Vol. 3.
Live: Return of the Storyteller — Snider’s third live album and 19th overall — comprises 15 songs from this “second tour,” his first time on the road since the pandemic started. The album comes in at a whopping 27 tracks, including the interludes for stories, rambles, jokes, eulogies, and improvisations.
Calling from his home in Nashville, Snider explains that around 75 shows from that 2021 run were recorded. “My sound guy and my tour manager, every night they would make notes of what they thought was good,” he says. “At the end of the tour, I made a set list. … And then they went and found what they thought were the best versions of all those songs and stories.”
