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Todd Snider: Pickin’. Grinnin’. Tellin’ Stories. Takin’ Requests Tour w/ Kevin Gordon

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Todd Snider: Pickin’. Grinnin’. Tellin’ Stories. Takin’ Requests Tour w/ Kevin Gordon

Sat, Apr 16 2022 - 8pm

Presented by DSP Shows

$30 Adv. / $35 DOS

Music Hall Doors Open at 7pm

16+ unless accompanied by parent or legal guardian.

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For the safety of our artists, venue staff and our community as a whole we will be requiring proof of vaccination for admittance to all shows at Gateway City Arts until further notice. Results from a negative COVID test will NOT be accepted for entry. In addition, masks are required to be worn at all times while at the venue. You may pull your mask down when eating or drinking only.

Please bring your vaccination card, or a photo of it, along with a corresponding state or federal ID for entry.

We encourage anyone who has yet to be vaccinated to get their shots as soon as possible.

General admission seated.

Todd Snider: Pickin’. Grinnin’. Tellin’ Stories. Takin’ Requests Tour w/ Kevin Gordon at Gateway City Arts in Holyoke, MA

Dine at GCA! Judd’s Bar & Restaurant is open Wednesday through Saturday from 5pm to 10pm. Small bites are available during all concerts at The Famous Cafe starting at 7pm.

About Todd Snider

You don’t often hear about an artist reinventing their sound twenty albums into a celebrated career. But for Todd Snider, his latest release, First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder, isn’t so much a sudden change in direction as an arrival after years of searching.

Since debuting in 1994, Snider has gone through his own incarnations. His first single “Talking Seattle Blues” was a head fake that might’ve pointed to goofy novelty songs. But he quickly showed that his artistic quiver was much deeper and more interesting. A storyteller who works a similar creative soil to John Prine and Shel Silverstein, Snider’s best songs are both sad and funny, political and entertaining, and always written with a poet’s eye and a stand-up comedian’s sensibility about the follies of human condition. While he’s made twenty fine albums, it’s on stage where Snider is even more potent, with between-song banter that weaves subtle emotional threads through his sets. A road dog who loves the road, Snider has toured with Emmylou Harris, John Prine, Jimmy Buffett, and appeared at festivals like Farm Aid, Newport Folk Fest, Lockn’ and Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

The other key framing device for the new songs is the album’s colorful title. “If the gods of folk didn’t want no funk, they shouldn’t have started none,” Snider says with a chuckle. “2020 was a terrible year, and it kept taking people that I loved. So I kept feeling funky, and the church idea came out of that. I’ve always had the First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder in mind. Aren’t we always hoping for something and wondering ‘What the fuck?’ We hope there’s a God. We wonder if there is. We hope you’re coming. We wonder if you will.”

“I started realizing because I had this church, in my mind, that I could make up different kinds of songs,” he continues. “I don’t usually like bossy kinds of songs, where someone tells you to breathe. Me and Neal Casal used to say, I don’t have to know when to fold ‘em. I don’t have to live like I’m dying.’ I’m always telling the radio when I’m listening to it, ‘No, I don’t!’ But this is a reverend thing. I have a reverend license. I married Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires, and my tour manager and his wife. So it just felt like this natural thing for it to be on Sunday mornings where I can do like these pseudo-sermons.”

He playfully undermines typical sermon themes like faith can move mountains – on “Turn Me Loose (I’ll Never Be the Same”), he reckons “Mountains can get around just fine on their own – and finding meaning on mystical sojourns – “Oh, shit, I quit my job,” the truth seeker on “The Get Together” realizes in a panic. “The record is the story of a preacher who starts this church that is total bullshit,” Todd says. “People start giving him money anyway, but then they start asking him questions. So then he prays to God and God helps him. But the moral of the story is that God’s hilarious.”

It feels appropriate that with his latest album, Snider may play a similar inspirational role for the parishioners in his church. “I’d like it to feel like a drum circle or a revival for listeners. I’d like it to feel like a hippie summer, where you take acid and listen to the songs by a beautiful lake. There’s a thing called effervescence – that feeling that you’re present, alive. I’d like for people to have a moment with this record. I think about records that will come into my life and they’ll help put a little more salt on the moment. That’s what I’m going for. But then, who knows if anyone will like the record. I dig it. I know it’s a cliché for people to say, ‘This is how I’ve been meaning to sound forever.’ But I swear, that’s how it feels.”

Snider was born in Portland, Oregon, and lived there until his family moved to Houston, Texas. When he was 15, he ran away from home with a friend and went back to Portland. After high school, he moved to Santa Rosa, California, to be a harmonica player. Then his brother, who lived in Austin, Texas, bought him a ticket to come live there. After seeing Jerry Jeff Walker in a local bar, Snider decided that he didn’t need a band to be a musician.

After moving to Memphis, Tennessee, in the mid-1980s and establishing residency at a club named the Daily Planet, he was discovered by Keith Sykes, a member of Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band. A longtime acquaintance of John Prine and Walker, Sykes began to work with Snider to help advance his career. Prine hired him as an assistant and then invited him to open shows. In time, Buffett heard Snider’s demo tapes and signed him to his own label. On his music, Snider has said “I was just trying to come up with the best … most open hearted … well-thought-out lyrics I could come up with. I wanted every song to be sad and funny at the same time, vulnerable and entertaining at the same time, personal and universal at the same time. I wanted every song to be as uniquely written as possible and then I wanted to perform them in a studio loose and rugged and hopefully as uniquely as I could. My hope is to be hard to describe and/or new … I’m not saying I am. I’m just saying that’s the hope.”

Snider’s 1994 debut album on MCA, entitled Songs for the Daily Planet, was named for the bar where Snider used to play regularly in Memphis. On that album were the minor hits “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues”—a folk song about the early ’90s grunge scene, featuring a band that “refused to play” —and “Alright Guy”, which later became the title cut of Gary Allan’s 2001 album.

He released two more albums for MCA, Step Right Up and Viva Satellite before moving to John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, for which he made Happy to Be Here, New Connection, Near Truths and Hotel Rooms, East Nashville Skyline, and Peace Love and Anarchy. That Was Me: The Best of Todd Snider 1994–1998 was released by Hip-O Records in August 2005.

Snider’s next studio album, The Devil You Know, was released in August 2006. It marked his return to a major label, New Door Records, a subsidiary of Universal Records. The Devil You Know was named to several critics’ year-end “best” lists, including a number 33 ranking in Rolling Stone magazine’s top 50 albums of the year, a number 25 ranking by No Depression magazine, and number 14 by Blender magazine.

Snider’s album Peace Queer was released on October 14, 2008, and reached number 1 on the Americana Airplay Chart on October 27, 2008. His album The Excitement Plan, produced by Don Was, was released on June 9, 2009, on the YepRoc label.

Snider contributed a cover version of “A Boy Named Sue” to the 2010 Sugar Hill Records album Twistable Turnable Man, a tribute by various artists to the songwriter Shel Silverstein.

Snider’s songs “Late Last Night” and “I Believe You” have been recorded by the Oklahoma red dirt band Cross Canadian Ragweed. He co-wrote the song “Barbie Doll” with the country star Jack Ingram.

Snider worked with Adult Swim to perform the “Fatal Distraction” variant of the Squidbillies theme song and part of “Listen to the Animals”. He also guest-starred, along with voice-over announcer Andrew Montesi and The Regular Guys radio DJ Larry Wachs, in the series, voicing a lobster.

In February 2011, Snider released a double-disc live album, The Storyteller, on his own record label, Aimless Records. The album features live versions of songs spanning much of Snider’s career along with some of the stories that have become a staple of his live show.

In April 2012, Snider released two albums, Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables and a tribute album, Time As We Know It: The Songs of Jerry Jeff Walker. The latter album is an homage to country singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker. American Songwriter claims, “Snider has been carrying on Walker’s scraggly Texas-styled country/Americana tradition since he started.”

The album Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables was listed at number 47 on Rolling Stone’s list of the top 50 albums of 2012, saying, “One of the sharpest, funniest storytellers in rock, Snider keeps the indictments coming.”

On December 20, 2013, Snider debuted a new band called Hard Working Americans at a benefit concert at the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado, for Colorado Flood Relief. The band’s first album is a collection of lesser-known cover songs, to be released January 2014. Snider said in an interview that he chose some of the covers because they were melodic and “I wanted it to be very melodic. I’m hoping to learn about that in this process.” The group includes bassist Dave Schools (of Widespread Panic), guitarist Neal Casal, keyboard player Chad Staehly and drummer Duane Trucks. The band also released a cover of “Come From the Heart” with Roseanne Cash, made available on iTunes in September 2014. Their second record, Rest in Chaos, was released in May 2016, and unlike the previous album, features mostly original songs written by the band, including lyrics by Snider.

In February 2019, Snider released “Like A Force Of Nature” from this Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol 3 album, released the following month.

About Kevin Gordon

Kevin Gordon’s Louisiana is a strange place. In his songs, it’s a place where restless teens road trip to where the highway dead-ends at the Gulf of Mexico; a place where prisoners who are in for life compete in a rodeo in front of spectators; where a man can get lost in the humid afternoon and where religion may not signify hope; where the KKK greets a high school marching band and its African-American teacher along a parade route; where a post-ZZ Top show hang out outside a McDonald’s reveals a hidden gun; where a Pontiac GTO gets stolen, ends up in a lake, and punishment takes precedence over remuneration; where half-Comanche folksinger Brownie Ford can escape death and proffer advice on staying real and free; where Jimmy Reed is the true king of rock & roll; and where rivers, never far away, carry secrets behind levees.

The kicker? All of these songs are based on true stories. Kevin Gordon has been exploring Louisiana for twenty years now, on the eve of the release of his powerful new album Tilt & Shine, out July 27, 2018 on Crowville Media. “One of the things I like about it and am mystified by is that what passes for normal in Louisiana would not make the grade elsewhere,” Gordon says. He continues, “It’s only 4 ½ or 5 hours from Monroe,where I grew up,to New Orleans; the influence of south Louisiana, the Acadian culture, the diverse influences of New Orleans, all that stuff kind of floats around the state.” Gordon’s MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop allows him to capture it with a degree of precision. As the New York Times put it in its headline of a feature on Kevin, “A Musician Or A Poet? Yes to Both.” Lucinda Williams said, “He’s writing songs that are like short stories” and noted music journalist Peter Guralnick has said, “Think of John Lee Hooker tied to the hard, imagistic poetry of William Carlos Williams, and you get a little bit of the picture.” With all these accolades, it’s no wonder that Gordon’s songs have been covered by the likes of Keith Richards, Levon Helm, Irma Thomas, The Hard Working Americans (featuring Todd Snider), Ronnie Hawkins, Sonny Burgess, and Southside Johnny.

Echoing Faulkner’s famous line that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past,” Kevin declares, “There’s something about that bouncing back and forth between present tense and past tense that provides a powerful energy to work from. There are so many stories in Monroe and it’s a place that nobody pays attention to. It’s still got a real provincial thing about it that is intriguing because you feel like not everything’s been figured out. For me, you can feel the arc of time passing: you can drive by the house you lived in when you were 12; you remember things that happened there. I’m captivated by the power of strong memories—those films that run continuously in your mind, if you let ‘em.”

Before you even hear Kevin Gordon’s vivid lyrics, you start feeling the sound of that ’56 Gibson ES-125 tuned down to low, open D, with the tremolo flowing like a river, and an unstoppable groove distilled from swamp blues and Sun Records. “It inevitably provides weird sounds and chords that I would not have figured out on my own,” Gordon says. “You’re just sitting there playing and listening until something accidental sounds interesting.” It’s also a sound that comes of the four-album partnership with producer Joe McMahan (Patrick Sweany, McCrary Sisters, Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer) , who says, “It still blows my mind how after all these years he continues to bring songs to the table that are as good or better than anything he has written in the past. When the bar is raised to such a high level by songs like these, it mandates that all of us involved demand the highest level from ourselves. I’m very fortunate to be involved.”

Coming of age in fits and starts is a theme to which Gordon has returned several times and he finds a new story here in the unsettling, insistent groove of “Fire at the End of the World,” a tale of friends who ran off with their parents’ car and a stash of drugs to see the point where the highway ends and the backwaters of the Gulf of Mexico begin. “Saint on a Chain” ranks up there with some of the best songwriting around, according to Paste Magazine’s Geoffrey Himes, who witnessed a live version at Americana Fest. It also came out of one of Kevin’s visits to Monroe, talking with an old friend. “We were sitting in his truck one time. He was playing a Springsteen record for me and he was under the influence of something pharmaceutical,” he remembers. Gordon spent years perfecting the song, saying, “I started thinking about the St. Christopher’s medal he wore, and ended up reading the story of how Jesus appeared as a child to the saint, as Christopher was helping people cross a flooded river. The Ouachita River runs between Monroe and West Monroe, and like a lot of rivers, it isn’t exactly crystal clear.” The song’s finale could see the character about to run his car off the road in a fit of self-destruction or perhaps on the verge of redemption.

These same themes play out in a more humorous fashion on rocking album closer “Get It Together” aka “Shit Together.” Sardonically, Gordon says, “It’s easier to talk about yourself when you’re not using the first person point of view. This is a song about what seems to be a constant battle of adulthood—negotiating that gap between knowing what you need to do, and actually doing it.” “Get It Together” also reminds one that Kevin’s no folksinger, launching into a kicking rock and roll groove. Similarly, “Right On Time” rips out of the gate, poking fun at the notion that things happen when they’re supposed to but also accepting the strangeness of the rock & roll road and its little victories.

One of the most powerful songs on the album, “One Road Out (Angola Rodeo Blues)” kicks off with a wicked John Lee Hooker-esque guitar line. Kevin says, “Joe handed me [Delta bluesman] Son Thomas’ fake Strat and I plugged it into one of his little amps and it sounded like Satan coming up from the sewer.” The sound evokes the setting, the infamous Angola State Penitentiary (one-time home to Lead Belly, bluesman Robert Pete Williams, and setting of the recent documentary “Serving Life”), where prisoners engage in a rodeo and a craft fair for a public audience. He adds, “It’s hard to watch, heartbreaking, even though those guys look forward to it.” With Tilt & Shine, Kevin Gordon takes the bitter with the sweet. His eye for a great story and ear for a key turn of phrase makes his songwriting a masterclass in craft, and an unflinchingly honest look at life in Louisiana.