A Conversation with Todd Snider (continued)

PM: So who is managing you? Is it Vickie Lucero and Bob Mercer and somebody--

TS: No. It's that Gold Mountain company, Burt Stein. And that was from Bob. When he came--he asked me if I would be interested in working with him. And I was like, "Gosh, I don't know"--I wasn't expecting all that. And he said, "Well, you'd have to get a bigger manager." And it's been a really lucky year for us, because then he said, "I want you to go meet this Burt Stein." So me and Burt started hanging out a little bit.

PM: He's a good dude.

TS: Yeah. And then two things that I thought were so cool is Vickie Lucero said to me, "You got to go with those guys, because they're so great." And I thought, "You're the sweetest person in the world." But the coolest thing is, Burt said, "She's got to come with you." And I thought that was really sweet. And now they're having a lot of fun. Me and my wife try to stay out of it, but I mean, they obviously--it seems like--we got to be on TV, and we got to do all kinds of fun stuff last year, so they can't be doing too bad. And I've never asked anybody one time in my life how many records I've sold. I can always tell by the way everybody looks at me when I come in the room if I'm still on the label or not.

[laughter]

TS: But I've never in my life ever asked anybody. And I tell all my managers and people like Burt knows and everybody knows that I want out of it. And I always tell those guys that are singers that say, "Well, I look after every inch of my"--I'm like, "I look after shit all."

PM: "I look after me and my wife."

TS: That's right. I'm like trying to listen to jazz music on my porch and make out a little bit.

[laughter]

PM: That's unbelievable. I think it's amazing how, in the world of singer/songwriters, you seem to be totally apart from the whole crowd, both the folk crowd and the Americana crowd, operating in your own sphere, your own universe. Is that how it seems to you?

TS: It seemed that way to me, but when you said it that sounded neat. I know I'm having a fuckin' ball doing it. And especially on this particular tour because my wife brought all her paintings and stuff, this one I've been--I woke up this morning and I thought, "God, I"--but then on the other hand I was like, "God, do I have the songs this time?" I got some new songs and I'm--I'm still staring at them, though. I don't know. We'll see what happens. I would like to make some new songs. We are making a DVD in the spring that's going to be cool.

PM: Really? Are they going to shoot a special concert or put a lot of concert footage together?

TS: Yeah, it's all this stuff. It's a bunch of stuff they're putting together. Like in the fall we went out and played on one of them TV shows. And the day before we went to this place called Rehearsals.com.

PM: Right.

TS: And they filmed like nine hours, or whatever. They put a few things out already, and we're not using those. But there's all this other stuff.

PM: Yeah. I went and watched some of that at Rehearsals.com the other day.

TS: Oh, did it look okay to you?

PM: Yeah. It looked really cool.

TS: Well, this is a little different. The one we're going to put out I think is more like on the band. And then also I made two videos one for a song called "Unbreakable." Every song from the new album is going to be on there, plus a few others. And then we made a little short film called Come to East Nashville.      continue

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