#todd snider

“A Love Letter to Handsome John” is Now Streaming

- Film features Todd Snider reminiscing about his friendship with John Prine

Todd Snider spoke - rather than wrote - his love letter to John Prine.

“I wanted to be John,” Snider says early in “A Love Letter to Handsome John,” the homemade, 55-minute film created by Snider’s friend Otis Gibbs and released on YouTube after a limited run in dozens of independent American theaters.

Filmed during a handful of sit-downs in the year leading up to Snider’s late-2025 death, the monologues feature a “baked,” pensive and distracted Snider reminiscing about his 20-year friendship and musical partnership with Prine and how he, Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver and Guy Clark accepted him as a lifer.

“They just knew I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Snider says in one of the film’s few funny moments.

Uncharacteristically unexcited and not at all animated, he talks circuitously about his first meeting with Prine, when Snider drove him to sessions for what would become the Missing Years. Before the “Love Letter” ends, Snider recalls their last couple of joint performances, including a 4/20 gig that featured “Illegal Smile.” That was the first time Prine told Snider he loved him and Snider figured Prine was sick, given the unexpected tenderness.

“He’s tough … as sensitive as his songs were,” Snider says of Prine.

Across the years, Snider was never able to let his guard down and fully be himself around Prine, because, “I revered him … I was just like, ‘yessir.’”

But Prine was good to Snider, going so far as to give - not sell - his publishing back after the latter left Oh Boy Records.

Snider’s death presumably left Gibbs with an unfinished movie and an only partially realized vision. As such, “Love Letter” features footage of Snider repeating himself and is padded with silent montages. It’s a fans-only product, but even fans might be left puzzled and/or disappointed but this disjointed affair.

But Gibbs doesn’t see it that way. He and Snider made the film for “the other (0).1 percent of people will love it,” he said in a statement.

“Those are our people,” Gibbs said. “The imperfect ones. The weirdos and the outsiders. They’ll be so damned grateful that we took the time to make this. No matter how flawed and ramshackled it is (and it is.) They’ll appreciate it and support it.”

Song Review: John Craigie - “Edna Strange” (eTown)

There’s nothing funny about John Craigie’s performance of “Edna Strange” on “eTown.”

Given it’s a cheating-that-leads-to-double-murder ballad in the Bakersfield tradition, the lack of humor may come as no surprise. But given this is Craigie on stage, it is, indeed, unusual.

No less so because Craigie generally performs solo; his presentation and stage banter obviously inspired by Todd Snider. But this appearance is likely geared toward promoting I Swam Here - read Sound Bites’ review here - leading Craigie to recreate the studio version of “Edna Strange,” while adding a few vocal flourishes fans of the LP will instantly notice.

Playing acoustic guitar and accompanied by electric guitar and rhythm section, Craigie dispassionately sings the story of two revenge killings - one by an enraged husband, the other by a freaked-out one-night stand caught in the act.

And if she gets credit for killing that man/I guess it’s all for the better/but nobody came for me, nobody knew/with husbands and wives, I guess you don’t look for clues/and if anyone asks me, I’ll tell ’em the truth/I barely knew Edna Strange

Grade card: John Craigie - “Edna Strange” (eTown) - B+

Album Review: John Craigie - I Swam Here

Title notwithstanding, John Craigie enters fresh musical waters on I Swam Here.

Album No. 10 from Craigie leans toward country(ish) music with lap-steel and nylon-stringed acoustic guitars bobbing alongside brushed drums, soft piano and organ and wordless backgrounds from Anna Moss. It’s spun together in a lo-fi mix that floats in the mid range, giving the music the aural impression of emanating from the bottom of a neighbor’s hot tub.

Craigie’s boyish vocals coming from down the hall add to the distant, yet intimate, feeling of songs about sex (“Fire Season”), songs about sex and murder (“Edna Strange”) and songs about sex and guilt (“Mama I Should Call”).

It all ends with Moss blowing her clarinet on the 2 a.m. closing-time lament “Don’t Let Me Run Away,” also about sex.

On stage, Craigie is mostly a solo-acoustic troubadour, a funny-ass folk singer in the vein of Todd Snider. In studio, he’s a changeling - pinging and ponging about the musical table he’s set for himself. I Swam Here continues the tradition in a big way and leaves to the imagination how he’ll roll these numbers out on the road and the introductory stories he’ll tell about them.

Grade card: John Craigie - I Swam Here - B+

Today's music video

"I Was Up Kinda Late Last Night" - Todd Snider, Austin City Limits

To borrow a phrase --kick out the jams mofos.

Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell Declares 4/20 Todd Snider Day

It’s official: 4/20 is Todd Snider Day in Nashville.

Mayor Freddie O’Connell signed a proclamation designating the TCH holiday - also known as April 20 - TSD in recognition of Snider’s role in defining the “artistic voice of East Nashville, reflecting the humor, grit, humanity and creative independence that have become hallmarks of both the neighborhood and the city of Nashville.”

Snider, who died in 2025, had long been known as the mayor of East Nashville and the mayor of Nashville nodded to the late musician’s “lasting role in shaping the community’s cultural identity and creative renaissance.”

“4/20 is right around the corner,” Snider’s record label, Aimless, Inc. said in a statement. “Thanks, Freddie.”

Song Review: Hard Working Americans - “Work for Peace”

Todd Snider’s first posthumous release comes in the form of Hard Working Americans’ “Work for Peace.”

The cover of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1994 track remains perpetually relevant with its historical references to war, Eisenhower and the military-industrial complex.

Americans no longer fight to keep their shores safe/just to keep the jobs going in the arms-making workplace, Snider intones over HWA’s low-key, sinewy groove.

At three minutes and change, this version is half as long - and half as funky - as the original. But coming as it does into a world of conflict, it still packs a peaceful punch.

Produced by HWA/Widespread Panic bassist Dave Schools, the song helps keep the band - and its late co-founders Snider and Neal Casal - alive nine years past its most-recent release, though there’s no word whether there’s more from whence “Work for Peace” came.

Grade card: Hard Working Americans - “Work for Peace” - B

I first saw Chicago Farmer, the moniker for Cody Diekhoff, opening up for Todd Snider. I came away impressed, not in small part because of Snider's endorsement of his music later in the show, where he joked that he and Chicago Farmer made “Americana music,” which used to just be called “unsuccessful country.” But success is in the eye of the beholder, and on his new album Homeaid, Chicago finds a lot of success in experimenting with his signature sound.

For his fourth album, Chicago Farmer moved away from the Arlo Guthrie/Todd Snider-esque folk of his previous three and into a fuller band sound. Working with Hard Working Americans' Chad Staehly as producer, Chicago Farmer also brought his touring band, The Fieldnotes, into the studio with him. The easy camaraderie of the band brought about a musical tightness that might not have existed otherwise.

One of the album's standout tracks, and the best indicator of a more rocking tone, is its first single, “Peshtigo.” Telling the story of a horrifying Wisconsin fire that didn't get much news coverage due to happening at the same time as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, it features a driving bassline that anchors Jaik Willis wailing guitars, as well as a surprisingly strident set of pipes from Diekhoff.

Album opener “Tina Hart's Mustang” is also a highlight. An ode to unbridled teenage excesses, it tells the story of a girl whose car is the fastest drag racer in her town. Or is it? When a rival racer buys the car, he finds it lacking in power, prompting Diekhoff to muse, “It wasn't Tina Hart's Mustang, it was always Tina Hart.”

“Sorry You're Sick” is a track about aging, and about caring for your loved ones, even if that caring isn't always the most productive. Addressing his unwell companion, Diekhoff helpfully asks, “What do you want from the liquor store? / Something sour? Something sweet?/ I'll buy you all your belly can hold / You can be sure you won't suffer no more.”

“The Twenty Dollar Bill” is the closest Homeaid has to Chicago Farmer's familiar folkie storyteller persona from his previous three albums. In it, Diekhoff celebrates his grandparents' unconditional love and the caring for others he saw in their lives. A simple emergency twenty from his grandmother is the vehicle Diekhoff uses to illustrate his grandmother's caring. “I'll keep you in my heart / and your twenty in my shoe,” Diekhoff sings before the song takes a darker turn with an attempted robbery foiled by a gift of “grandpa's knife.”

Before His Death, Todd Snider Made “A Love Letter to Handsome John”

- Otis Gibbs’ film to show in select theaters before moving to YouTube

Todd Snider looks happy as he walks by the water, silhouetted by the sun. He introduces himself and explains the concept behind what is now a short film called “A Love Letter to Handsome John.”

“If you know who I am, there’s a good chance that it’s because of a man named John Prine,” Snider says in the trailer. “I wanted to get together with my friend Otis Gibbs and make a film about my memories of John - kind of like a love letter to him.”

After Snider’s death in 2025, Gibbs finished the movie and, as Snider insisted, will show it in select theaters before putting the 54-minute “Love Letter” on YouTube.

“(Snider) said there’s nothing more powerful than a community coming together in one room to share something real,” Gibbs said. “ … He was right, so I promised him we’d show it in a movie theater.”

“A Love Letter to Handsome John” is therefore scheduled to screen April 3 in Indianapolis and April 9 in Nashville. It’ll eventually be available for streaming.