Todd Snider has announced the release of Return Of The Storyteller (out September 23 via Todd’s own Aimless Records and Thirty Tigers), a live album featuring songs and stories captured during his first performances after venues opened back up last year. Anyone that has followed Snider will know how much of a gifted storyteller he is. The man’s tales are so well known that I can think of no other singer (apart from maybe the late John Prine) where the audience is looking forward to the banter as much as they are the songs. A write-up on his book, I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like: Mostly True Tall Tales, said it perfectly:
There are storytellers and there are performers and there are stand-up comedians. And then there’s Todd Snider, who is all three in one, and something else entirely.
The material covered on the album is expansive, from his 1994 debut album Songs from the Daily Planet through 2021’s First Agnostic Church Of Hope And Wonder. According to the press, Snider uses much of his storytelling to pay homage to friends gone too soon including John Prine (who we interviewed here), Jerry Jeff Walker, Neal Casal and Colonel Bruce Hampton. But typical of a Snider live show, his stage banter also veers into one-of-a-kind road tales like conversing with haunted ghost children in California, raising hell with the inventor of Crocs in Montana and misadventures in the woods behind Johnny Cash’s house in Tennessee.
In conjunction with the album announcement Snider has also shared a new live version of “Just Like Old Times,” his 2006 fan favourite that was turned into a feature film – ‘Hard Luck Love Song’ – in 2020.
Listen to “Just like Old Times” from ‘Live: Return Of The Storyteller’ and watch the accompanying ‘tour diary’-style music video below:
Snider says: “this album is dedicated to all the people who come to these shows whether this last tour was the first one you caught you’ve been coming since 94, or you joined the family somewhere in between you have my undying gratitude traveling and singing has been the great joy of my life and it’s not lost on me who makes it possible thank you.”
Pre-order ‘Live: Return Of The Storyteller’ here, and become eligible for a chance to win a harmonica and guitar pick used by Snider on his 2021 tour: toddsnidershop.com