Todd Snider Article
Posted: September 22, 2004 3:57 pm
From The Tennessean:
http://www.tennessean.com/entertainment ... 5983.shtml
Like a rolling stone, revisited
By PETER COOPER
Staff Writer
''East Nashville Skyline'' reveals poet and a place in transition
The joke was that singer-songwriter Todd Snider's bald tour manager, Dave Hixx, looked like Elvis Presley.
''I look at it as a gift,'' Hixx often explained. ''A gift from God.''
Hixx doesn't really look like Elvis, but he can sing like the King, and he likes to put Elvis CDs into the van's CD player while driving Snider around the country.
''I can't sleep,'' Snider said in middle Virginia, knowing he'd need a nap before the van rolled into Alexandria, Va., for his headlining gig at a large club called The Birchmere. A curious mix of restlessness and lethargy, Snider, 37, is bad at sleeping and not much better at being tired. He is good at writing and singing songs, though: good enough that guitar poet heroes including Kris Kristofferson, John Prine and Billy Joe Shaver think he may be the next in their line. He's also the author of an idiosyncratic, hilarious but deeply pained gem of a new album called East Nashville Skyline.
Anyway, he needed a nap. A few miles down the road, Hixx ejected Elvis, slipped Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited disc into the player, and the van filled with the sounds of Dylan's rapid-fire rasp and wailing, cacophonous harmonica. Like A Rolling Stone and Tombstone Blues are lullabies to Snider. Somewhere in the album's third song, along where Dylan proclaims ''Don't say I never warned you when your train gets lost,'' the singer fell into slumber.
East Nashville is different from Nashville proper. Maybe it's Nashville improper. Big, nice houses sit yards away from derelict rental duplexes. Crack dealers walk past artsy bistros. Brown bags cover discarded 40-ounce bottles on curbside pavement in a historic district. Todd Snider's neighborhood is ''transitional,'' but it's hard to say in which direction the transition will end up. Snider, too, is transitional.
''I knew there was something there the first time I heard him,'' John Prine said. ''But I didn't know whether it should be killed or nurtured.''
Snider's path to East Nashville was as crooked as anyone else's. By the time he hit Memphis in the late 1980s, the Oregon native had become accustomed to a gypsy life. He didn't learn to play guitar until he was 20. By the time he was 21, music was his only job.
''First time I heard him was at a pizza place in 1989,'' said Rivers Rutherford, a Memphis contemporary of Snider's who has become a hit songwriter in Nashville. ''There were only about five people there. This one rough-looking guy started heckling him, but within 60 seconds Todd had ripped that guy to shreds and then made a huge fan of him.''
With Memphis musician/publisher Keith Sykes helping him along (''Keith basically gave me a life, and he didn't get a thing in return.''), Snider was allowed a visit/audition at Nashville label chief Jimmy Bowen's home. Snider was a poor, pot-smoking, bedraggled folk singer, trying to make small talk in a rich man's mansion. He asked Bowen, ''Do you believe in God?'' Bowen gestured to his opulent surroundings, nodded in the affirmative and said, ''He likes me.''
A Bowen deal was signed but never consummated, and Sykes found Snider another home at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville imprint of MCA Records. Both Buffett and MCA Nashville boss Tony Brown approved the deal. Snider doesn't remember much about the year leading up to the 1994 release of his first album. His father died, and it was a hard time. Though he and his dad were seldom of like mind, they were of like spirit.
''He was a bit of a grifter type, a construction person who was always not friends with the last person he worked with,'' Snider said. ''He was a Catholic. Every night it was like it was Friday night, and every day it was like it was Sunday. He had to go to that little booth a lot.''
A fledgling recording artist, Snider was already a veteran at drinking and drugging. Bi-polar tendencies and grief for his father added to the chaos. He had a semi-hit on his hands, though, with a hidden track called Talkin' Seattle Grunge Rock Blues, which satirized the ultra-serious grunge movement. The semi-hit went away, but the exposure helped enormously. Snider had been on television, thus he must be somebody.
''Tony Brown and Jimmy Buffett did me right,'' he said. ''They let me make that album, and I've been a jerk ever since. If I were going to be a disciplined person with goals, I'd have gone into something else.''
Todd Snider isn't a jerk, and he swears he's not an instigator. He's not a redemption story, either. He is a screw-up at times. And he regrets ever taking pain pills, and he probably shouldn't have moved from Nashville to L.A., in part because L.A. is a lousy place to chill out or sober up.
Four years, three major-label albums and one major-label blowup after signing his deal, he moved back to Nashville — to East Nashville, in fact — and began making records for Al Bunetta's indie label, Oh Boy Records, in 2000. By then, he was widely considered unreliable.
''He's genuine,'' Bunetta said. ''He's crazy, crazy brilliant. Crazy as a fox, I call him.''
At Oh Boy, Snider toned down a sound that had begun to veer into Tom Petty rock 'n' roll territory. The songs got sadder, too, though no less funny. Prine, a master at whittling big ideas into evocative lyrical specifics, helped Snider get to the core of a song called Long Year, about an unsuccessful trip to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. At the end of the song, the narrator heads from the meeting to a bar: ''They said 'Brother, all you need is another shot'/ So I threw one down and said 'Thanks a lot'/ As I thought to myself, 'Well, here we go again.' ''
He showed the song to old songwriting pal Rutherford.
''He said, 'Listen to this one, isn't that great?' '' Rutherford remembered. ''What I said back was, 'It's just sick.' I do think it's a great song, but what I thought of the song was inconsequential. I just hurt for him.''
As Dave ''Elvis'' Hixx drove along, a photo of Snider's friend and former tour manager, Skip Litz, rested on the van's dashboard.
Litz — a loud, Southern Comfort-swilling, beach ball-bellied walrus of a man — died in July 2003. He was a true friend to Snider, and he's the subject of East Nashville Skyline's Train Song: ''He was a runaway locomotive/ Out of his one-track mind,'' is what Snider wrote.
''Everyone loved Skip,'' Hixx said. ''Actually, I get a little jealous. He was obviously very close to Todd, and he was a good road manager, and people thought so much of him. Plus, one glance at the picture and you can see he looked just like Fabian.''
Todd Snider hasn't gotten famous in the new century, but he may be working on something better.
Without radio hits, he has nonetheless expanded his audience. In concert, he has rehearsed his stories and songs until they seem almost off-the-cuff. His comic timing is impeccable, and he can follow something like Long Year with rambling laughers that break tension. Working underneath the popular radar, he has nonetheless built the foundation of a long-term career.
''Sometimes people see Todd up there and they go, 'He's eccentric. It's not going to work for him,' '' said guitarist and longtime collaborator Will Kimbrough. ''But it is working for him.''
When he plays, people show up to hear him. When he plays again, they show up again, and they bring friends. He sings to them in a ravaged but tone-true rasp, and tells them stories in a voice that sounds like a stoner version of Grover from Sesame Street.
Internet groups dedicate chat rooms to him. One such group bought him a new guitar. He's never sold 500,000 copies of an album, but Oh Boy's costs are considerably less than a major label's, so his music makes money. He is among the most successful artists of the burgeoning ''Americana'' genre. (See getting there information below)
''This is the kind of music that takes a long, long time to break, and takes a long, long time to go away,'' Bunetta said.
Those things, along with his marriage to painter Melita Osheowitz, make him happy. Or happier. Those are the things that normally cause formerly troubled musicians to say things like, ''I'm in a really good place now.'' Snider doesn't say things like that, though. He laughs more these days, but that doesn't mean he's going to say he's in a good place.
The year 2003 was one big bad place for Snider. His back hurt, his stomach hurt, and he mixed booze and pot with a narcotic prescription painkiller called OxyContin. He was getting thrown out of bars, and he was arrested in Oregon when a highway crew guy told the police that Snider had swerved to hit him. A charge that Snider denies, and that seems out of character for a man of whom Bunetta said, ''If Todd had a gun, he'd shoot himself in the foot.''
Then his best friend Skip Litz died in July. The ensuing months were a blur. In November, Snider went to the hospital with searing stomach pains. He was ordered to go to drug rehab and was forced to cancel shows. And somewhere in there he wrote some songs and they were some of the best he'd ever written.
There was one about the Oregon jail, one about Litz, one about Nashville and a couple that were more or less about himself. One of those ended: ''I thought that I'd be dead by now, but I'm not''; the other ended with a guy who'd tried to commit suicide waking up determined to make the best of a second chance, to go out ''walkin' souls into the holes of my shoes.''
He did go out walking, in East Nashville, and he wound up checking out friend Eric McConnell's studio on one of those walks. And then he wound up recording there, and calling in Kimbrough to produce. And he called the finished album East Nashville Skyline, and Prine and Bunetta and Billy Joe Shaver and Kris Kristofferson loved it.
Snider celebrated the album's completion by doing drugs again, and wound up back in the hospital early this year. Since that scare, he's leveled out some, gotten back on the road and done a whole lot of explaining to interviewers, friends, fans and others about just why he'd been living so hard. Sometimes he'd quote a John Prine song, the one where Prine sings, ''Way down/ I can't stop this misery/ It must be way down.''
And then he'd smile kindly and make some joke, or, better yet, sing something. The night after the Birchmere show, he went to hear Prine and Kristofferson in concert, and Kristofferson gave him a big hug and said, ''I'm so proud of you, man. You're the real deal.'' And that makes him happy. Or happier.
''Anything you want to talk about, I'll talk about it, just so long as it doesn't sound like I'm bragging about taking drugs,'' Snider said, before taking the stage at a performance hall in Germantown, Md. ''I'm not bragging about it, at all.''
That night, he agonized over the set list, then ended up taking requests all night and negating the hour he'd spent on the list. For an encore, he played some Billy Joe Shaver songs, and one song he'd written about the death of Billy Joe's son, Eddy Shaver, a friend of Snider's who died from a heroin overdose. Then Snider concluded with the chorus of Billy Joe's most uplifting number: ''I'm just an old chunk of coal,'' he sang. ''But I'm gonna be a diamond someday.''
He left the stage with a smile, leaving his audience with a nearly unanimous notion: ''He's in a really good place, isn't he?''
Two minutes later, he was alone in a hallway, banging on a backstage piano and singing Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone: ''People'd call, say 'Beware doll, you're bound to fall'/ You thought they were all kiddin' you.''
Getting there
The Americana Music Association's annual conference takes place in Nashville this Thursday, Friday and Saturday, meaning area clubs Mercy Lounge, The Station Inn and 12th & Porter will be filled with music that's (very) loosely defined as ''American roots music based on the traditions of country.''
Todd Snider will be on The Station Inn bill Thursday night, performing with The Mammals, Grey DeLisle and Adrienne Young at a show slated to begin at 9 p.m. and end at 1 a.m. Other show lineups and schedules may be found online at americanamusic.org.
While conference registration is $350 to non-AMA members, wristbands good for admission to the three nights of shows are available for $25. Again, consult the americanamusic.org Web site.
In addition to daily panels and nightly performances, the AMA will hold an awards show at 7 p.m. Friday at the Nashville Convention Center. The Tennessean will provide coverage of the awards show, as well as daily, notebook-style entries from the conference.
A briefly annotated discography
• Songs for the Daily Planet, 1994 (HH½) — The production was too polished, and Snider didn't yet sound comfortable in his own voice, but the radio success of Talkin' Seattle Grunge Rock Blues made this the closest thing he's had to a hit album.
• Step Right Up, 1996 (HHH) — Less contrived and more assured than the Songs album, this album has some good stuff, particularly the sparse Tension and rocker Late Last Night.
• Viva Satellite, 1998 (HHH) — ''I didn't realize I was copying Tom Petty until the album was already done,'' Snider would later say of this one. Aside from the egregious Petty nods and a cover of The Joker that Snider didn't want on the album, this was a strong release.
• Happy To Be Here, 2000 (HHH) — Here, Snider scaled back the rock stuff and became a folk singer again. Long Year, D.B. Cooper and the title track were particularly evocative and accomplished.
• New Connection, 2002 (HHH½) — Funkier than Happy, and packed with smart, funny songs. (Statistician's Blues, Broke, etc.) The album-closing Waco Moon is a stunner.
• Near Truths and Hotel Rooms, 2003 (HHH½) — Snider makes his living on the road and this live album illustrates why.
• East Nashville Skyline, 2004 (HHHH) — His first masterful studio album, recorded in East Nashville shortly after Snider emerged from a drug rehabilitation stint. Snider's voice sounds ravaged at times, and the humor can't hope to offset some dark, dark moments. But the botched-suicide tale of Sunshine ends up providing hope for singer and listener alike.
http://www.tennessean.com/entertainment ... 5983.shtml
Like a rolling stone, revisited
By PETER COOPER
Staff Writer
''East Nashville Skyline'' reveals poet and a place in transition
The joke was that singer-songwriter Todd Snider's bald tour manager, Dave Hixx, looked like Elvis Presley.
''I look at it as a gift,'' Hixx often explained. ''A gift from God.''
Hixx doesn't really look like Elvis, but he can sing like the King, and he likes to put Elvis CDs into the van's CD player while driving Snider around the country.
''I can't sleep,'' Snider said in middle Virginia, knowing he'd need a nap before the van rolled into Alexandria, Va., for his headlining gig at a large club called The Birchmere. A curious mix of restlessness and lethargy, Snider, 37, is bad at sleeping and not much better at being tired. He is good at writing and singing songs, though: good enough that guitar poet heroes including Kris Kristofferson, John Prine and Billy Joe Shaver think he may be the next in their line. He's also the author of an idiosyncratic, hilarious but deeply pained gem of a new album called East Nashville Skyline.
Anyway, he needed a nap. A few miles down the road, Hixx ejected Elvis, slipped Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited disc into the player, and the van filled with the sounds of Dylan's rapid-fire rasp and wailing, cacophonous harmonica. Like A Rolling Stone and Tombstone Blues are lullabies to Snider. Somewhere in the album's third song, along where Dylan proclaims ''Don't say I never warned you when your train gets lost,'' the singer fell into slumber.
East Nashville is different from Nashville proper. Maybe it's Nashville improper. Big, nice houses sit yards away from derelict rental duplexes. Crack dealers walk past artsy bistros. Brown bags cover discarded 40-ounce bottles on curbside pavement in a historic district. Todd Snider's neighborhood is ''transitional,'' but it's hard to say in which direction the transition will end up. Snider, too, is transitional.
''I knew there was something there the first time I heard him,'' John Prine said. ''But I didn't know whether it should be killed or nurtured.''
Snider's path to East Nashville was as crooked as anyone else's. By the time he hit Memphis in the late 1980s, the Oregon native had become accustomed to a gypsy life. He didn't learn to play guitar until he was 20. By the time he was 21, music was his only job.
''First time I heard him was at a pizza place in 1989,'' said Rivers Rutherford, a Memphis contemporary of Snider's who has become a hit songwriter in Nashville. ''There were only about five people there. This one rough-looking guy started heckling him, but within 60 seconds Todd had ripped that guy to shreds and then made a huge fan of him.''
With Memphis musician/publisher Keith Sykes helping him along (''Keith basically gave me a life, and he didn't get a thing in return.''), Snider was allowed a visit/audition at Nashville label chief Jimmy Bowen's home. Snider was a poor, pot-smoking, bedraggled folk singer, trying to make small talk in a rich man's mansion. He asked Bowen, ''Do you believe in God?'' Bowen gestured to his opulent surroundings, nodded in the affirmative and said, ''He likes me.''
A Bowen deal was signed but never consummated, and Sykes found Snider another home at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville imprint of MCA Records. Both Buffett and MCA Nashville boss Tony Brown approved the deal. Snider doesn't remember much about the year leading up to the 1994 release of his first album. His father died, and it was a hard time. Though he and his dad were seldom of like mind, they were of like spirit.
''He was a bit of a grifter type, a construction person who was always not friends with the last person he worked with,'' Snider said. ''He was a Catholic. Every night it was like it was Friday night, and every day it was like it was Sunday. He had to go to that little booth a lot.''
A fledgling recording artist, Snider was already a veteran at drinking and drugging. Bi-polar tendencies and grief for his father added to the chaos. He had a semi-hit on his hands, though, with a hidden track called Talkin' Seattle Grunge Rock Blues, which satirized the ultra-serious grunge movement. The semi-hit went away, but the exposure helped enormously. Snider had been on television, thus he must be somebody.
''Tony Brown and Jimmy Buffett did me right,'' he said. ''They let me make that album, and I've been a jerk ever since. If I were going to be a disciplined person with goals, I'd have gone into something else.''
Todd Snider isn't a jerk, and he swears he's not an instigator. He's not a redemption story, either. He is a screw-up at times. And he regrets ever taking pain pills, and he probably shouldn't have moved from Nashville to L.A., in part because L.A. is a lousy place to chill out or sober up.
Four years, three major-label albums and one major-label blowup after signing his deal, he moved back to Nashville — to East Nashville, in fact — and began making records for Al Bunetta's indie label, Oh Boy Records, in 2000. By then, he was widely considered unreliable.
''He's genuine,'' Bunetta said. ''He's crazy, crazy brilliant. Crazy as a fox, I call him.''
At Oh Boy, Snider toned down a sound that had begun to veer into Tom Petty rock 'n' roll territory. The songs got sadder, too, though no less funny. Prine, a master at whittling big ideas into evocative lyrical specifics, helped Snider get to the core of a song called Long Year, about an unsuccessful trip to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. At the end of the song, the narrator heads from the meeting to a bar: ''They said 'Brother, all you need is another shot'/ So I threw one down and said 'Thanks a lot'/ As I thought to myself, 'Well, here we go again.' ''
He showed the song to old songwriting pal Rutherford.
''He said, 'Listen to this one, isn't that great?' '' Rutherford remembered. ''What I said back was, 'It's just sick.' I do think it's a great song, but what I thought of the song was inconsequential. I just hurt for him.''
As Dave ''Elvis'' Hixx drove along, a photo of Snider's friend and former tour manager, Skip Litz, rested on the van's dashboard.
Litz — a loud, Southern Comfort-swilling, beach ball-bellied walrus of a man — died in July 2003. He was a true friend to Snider, and he's the subject of East Nashville Skyline's Train Song: ''He was a runaway locomotive/ Out of his one-track mind,'' is what Snider wrote.
''Everyone loved Skip,'' Hixx said. ''Actually, I get a little jealous. He was obviously very close to Todd, and he was a good road manager, and people thought so much of him. Plus, one glance at the picture and you can see he looked just like Fabian.''
Todd Snider hasn't gotten famous in the new century, but he may be working on something better.
Without radio hits, he has nonetheless expanded his audience. In concert, he has rehearsed his stories and songs until they seem almost off-the-cuff. His comic timing is impeccable, and he can follow something like Long Year with rambling laughers that break tension. Working underneath the popular radar, he has nonetheless built the foundation of a long-term career.
''Sometimes people see Todd up there and they go, 'He's eccentric. It's not going to work for him,' '' said guitarist and longtime collaborator Will Kimbrough. ''But it is working for him.''
When he plays, people show up to hear him. When he plays again, they show up again, and they bring friends. He sings to them in a ravaged but tone-true rasp, and tells them stories in a voice that sounds like a stoner version of Grover from Sesame Street.
Internet groups dedicate chat rooms to him. One such group bought him a new guitar. He's never sold 500,000 copies of an album, but Oh Boy's costs are considerably less than a major label's, so his music makes money. He is among the most successful artists of the burgeoning ''Americana'' genre. (See getting there information below)
''This is the kind of music that takes a long, long time to break, and takes a long, long time to go away,'' Bunetta said.
Those things, along with his marriage to painter Melita Osheowitz, make him happy. Or happier. Those are the things that normally cause formerly troubled musicians to say things like, ''I'm in a really good place now.'' Snider doesn't say things like that, though. He laughs more these days, but that doesn't mean he's going to say he's in a good place.
The year 2003 was one big bad place for Snider. His back hurt, his stomach hurt, and he mixed booze and pot with a narcotic prescription painkiller called OxyContin. He was getting thrown out of bars, and he was arrested in Oregon when a highway crew guy told the police that Snider had swerved to hit him. A charge that Snider denies, and that seems out of character for a man of whom Bunetta said, ''If Todd had a gun, he'd shoot himself in the foot.''
Then his best friend Skip Litz died in July. The ensuing months were a blur. In November, Snider went to the hospital with searing stomach pains. He was ordered to go to drug rehab and was forced to cancel shows. And somewhere in there he wrote some songs and they were some of the best he'd ever written.
There was one about the Oregon jail, one about Litz, one about Nashville and a couple that were more or less about himself. One of those ended: ''I thought that I'd be dead by now, but I'm not''; the other ended with a guy who'd tried to commit suicide waking up determined to make the best of a second chance, to go out ''walkin' souls into the holes of my shoes.''
He did go out walking, in East Nashville, and he wound up checking out friend Eric McConnell's studio on one of those walks. And then he wound up recording there, and calling in Kimbrough to produce. And he called the finished album East Nashville Skyline, and Prine and Bunetta and Billy Joe Shaver and Kris Kristofferson loved it.
Snider celebrated the album's completion by doing drugs again, and wound up back in the hospital early this year. Since that scare, he's leveled out some, gotten back on the road and done a whole lot of explaining to interviewers, friends, fans and others about just why he'd been living so hard. Sometimes he'd quote a John Prine song, the one where Prine sings, ''Way down/ I can't stop this misery/ It must be way down.''
And then he'd smile kindly and make some joke, or, better yet, sing something. The night after the Birchmere show, he went to hear Prine and Kristofferson in concert, and Kristofferson gave him a big hug and said, ''I'm so proud of you, man. You're the real deal.'' And that makes him happy. Or happier.
''Anything you want to talk about, I'll talk about it, just so long as it doesn't sound like I'm bragging about taking drugs,'' Snider said, before taking the stage at a performance hall in Germantown, Md. ''I'm not bragging about it, at all.''
That night, he agonized over the set list, then ended up taking requests all night and negating the hour he'd spent on the list. For an encore, he played some Billy Joe Shaver songs, and one song he'd written about the death of Billy Joe's son, Eddy Shaver, a friend of Snider's who died from a heroin overdose. Then Snider concluded with the chorus of Billy Joe's most uplifting number: ''I'm just an old chunk of coal,'' he sang. ''But I'm gonna be a diamond someday.''
He left the stage with a smile, leaving his audience with a nearly unanimous notion: ''He's in a really good place, isn't he?''
Two minutes later, he was alone in a hallway, banging on a backstage piano and singing Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone: ''People'd call, say 'Beware doll, you're bound to fall'/ You thought they were all kiddin' you.''
Getting there
The Americana Music Association's annual conference takes place in Nashville this Thursday, Friday and Saturday, meaning area clubs Mercy Lounge, The Station Inn and 12th & Porter will be filled with music that's (very) loosely defined as ''American roots music based on the traditions of country.''
Todd Snider will be on The Station Inn bill Thursday night, performing with The Mammals, Grey DeLisle and Adrienne Young at a show slated to begin at 9 p.m. and end at 1 a.m. Other show lineups and schedules may be found online at americanamusic.org.
While conference registration is $350 to non-AMA members, wristbands good for admission to the three nights of shows are available for $25. Again, consult the americanamusic.org Web site.
In addition to daily panels and nightly performances, the AMA will hold an awards show at 7 p.m. Friday at the Nashville Convention Center. The Tennessean will provide coverage of the awards show, as well as daily, notebook-style entries from the conference.
A briefly annotated discography
• Songs for the Daily Planet, 1994 (HH½) — The production was too polished, and Snider didn't yet sound comfortable in his own voice, but the radio success of Talkin' Seattle Grunge Rock Blues made this the closest thing he's had to a hit album.
• Step Right Up, 1996 (HHH) — Less contrived and more assured than the Songs album, this album has some good stuff, particularly the sparse Tension and rocker Late Last Night.
• Viva Satellite, 1998 (HHH) — ''I didn't realize I was copying Tom Petty until the album was already done,'' Snider would later say of this one. Aside from the egregious Petty nods and a cover of The Joker that Snider didn't want on the album, this was a strong release.
• Happy To Be Here, 2000 (HHH) — Here, Snider scaled back the rock stuff and became a folk singer again. Long Year, D.B. Cooper and the title track were particularly evocative and accomplished.
• New Connection, 2002 (HHH½) — Funkier than Happy, and packed with smart, funny songs. (Statistician's Blues, Broke, etc.) The album-closing Waco Moon is a stunner.
• Near Truths and Hotel Rooms, 2003 (HHH½) — Snider makes his living on the road and this live album illustrates why.
• East Nashville Skyline, 2004 (HHHH) — His first masterful studio album, recorded in East Nashville shortly after Snider emerged from a drug rehabilitation stint. Snider's voice sounds ravaged at times, and the humor can't hope to offset some dark, dark moments. But the botched-suicide tale of Sunshine ends up providing hope for singer and listener alike.