Any kind of heaven every body doesn’t get in/Won’t seem like a heaven to me.—Todd Snider in “If Tomorrow Never Comes”

The leaves are mostly off the trees now and the winter is approaching quickly as autumn shrinks to fewer and fewer days each year. The opportunities to shuffle lazily along a leaf-covered path in the waning afternoon sunlight wearing nothing but a light jacket or a wool sweater are fleetingly rare. I could really use one of those afternoons. Just a few days ago I woke up on a cold and dreary morning to read that the singer Todd Snider had passed away at the age of 59, and things have felt kind of off since—as they did when John Prine passed away and when I learned that J. D. Hutchison had. I’ve never been one of those music fans with an oversized sense of closeness to the artists I love—I’ve only ever spoken to a few of the musicians I’ve listened to over the years, preferring instead to just sit back with the experience the songs evoke. But Snider (like Prine, like Hutchison) wrote the kind of songs that draw you close to the performer. Intimate songs full of love and humor and heartache in measurements that feel real, authentic, true. All three, and a few other musicians as well, came across like people you might strike up a conversation with over a beer at your local bar. And none more so than Snider.

To his fans and writers of articles about him, Snider was a stoner hippie folksinger, and I suppose he was exactly that in the day-to-day operation of his life and in his laid-back, shoeless performances—every one full of long, rambling, and deeply hilarious stories (you can get a taste of this on his live albums if you were never fortunate enough to see him play). He certainly cultivated this image and, by all accounts, lived it pretty honestly. If I seem hesitant to say much about who he was, it’s because I realize that as a mere fan, I have neither the knowledge nor the right to do so, and I’m skeptical of the way we have grown so comfortable reporting on both celebrities and everyday folks as if we know every twist and turn of their being. Was he the heir apparent to John Prine? I certainly think so, but I imagine he would deny that pretty quickly. An heir apparent to John Prine could never be the person who readily agreed that they were. But I don’t know of any other two songwriters who so consistently managed to capture the pain and sadness, the joy and beauty, the undeniable funniness of life—all while nodding to its utter absurdity. In this at least they were cut from the same cloth. It’s no easy balance to strike.

Todd Snider was the kind of guy who could write a song like “You Think You Know Somebody,” a devastating story of child abuse, and put it on the same album as “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues” (an era-mocking tale of a band that ends up the “alternative to alternative” by not playing music) and “Alright Guy,” whose narrator’s assertions of his “alrightness” includes the observation, “I know I get wild and I know I get drunk/But it ain’t like I got a bunch of bodies in my trunk” (Songs For The Daily Planet—1994). Of this last song, I am reminded of the time (one of many) I saw him in Cleveland and he replaced the line, “It ain’t like I’m going on TV and tearing up pictures of the Pope,” with one mocking Lebron James’ recent departure to Miami that left the Cavs in the lurch.

Snider was above all else a world-class raconteur, of which there are truly very few (but plenty of bloviators who believe they are). I don’t count myself as one of those who is, and I don’t think I’d be doing Todd any justice by spending time here going on and on about all of his shows I have been to, the number of which I can’t remember anyway, spread across the last twenty-five or so years that I’ve been a fan. I can remember the first time I saw him—in a field in the early days of the Nelsonville Music Festival—but after that it’s a big whirling blur of towns and stages and audiences. That would have been the second year of the festival—2006—which I also remember for a very drunk Leon Redbone performing like. . . well. . . Leon Redbone. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Snider to tread those boards night after night, year after year for the last 35. I never once saw him humorless or lose his cool, though I suppose he must have from time to time.

I won’t get into the stories of the last month or so, all of which are sensationally-and incompletely-covered elsewhere and not really worth rehashing. If you have a shred of humanity in you (which Todd seemed better than most to still see in others) that month is tragic and sad. A more complete truth of it will likely come for those close to him, and maybe to his fans. But if it doesn’t, the only response I can imagine being appropriate at this moment is to listen to his music and count ourselves very lucky that he shared it with us. I suggest starting with “Play a Train Song.” I’d like to think he’d have wanted his fans to feel like the narrator of that song: “And though I tried with all of my sadness/Somehow I just could not weep/For a man who looked to me like he/Died laughin’ in his sleep.” In the bleak, rainy days of autumn/winter it’s truly difficult not to feel sad about Todd Snider passing away, knowing I’ll not get another one of those famous 18-minute stories that leaves you laughing to the point of tears. For now there’s just the tears. . .