“If folk don’t want no funk, it shouldn’t start none,” Todd Snider proclaims with a laugh. It’s funny, of course, because no one in the folk world is trying to start any funk. Well, that is, no one other than Snider on his new album First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder, which will be released Friday.
For the past six months, I’ve been working on a book with Snider, and as a result, I had a front-row seat for the making of the record. I even accidentally got a co-writing credit on one of the songs when he used something I said in passing. It’s an album that is more than the realization of Snider’s funk dreams. It’s the culmination of a musical journey the artist has been on for more than a decade of his nearly 35-year career.
The seeds for First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder were planted on the song “Is This Thing Working?” from Snider’s 2008 Peace Queer EP. “That was a small blueprint of where I was trying to go,” he says. “It’s just one chord. It never goes anywhere, just sits there and tells the story. I started to see that the one-chord song was a funk thing.” Snider was soon envisioning a funk thing of his own and has been pursuing it off and on ever since.
Snider’s time in the jam-band supergroup Hard Working Americans helped him see he was funkier than he knew, and when that group disbanded, his thoughts returned to the funky sounds he was hearing in his head. Over the next three years, he listened to a lot of P-Funk and a lot of reggae, learned to play bass, and met with some well-known producers. None of them could hear what he was hearing, but Snider was undeterred.
“There’s a muse, a sonic muse that you chase,” he says. “I didn’t stop listening to the muse once it became hard to grasp. It gets way ahead of you sometimes, and you gotta just keep following it. And it’s easy to stop following it, because you don’t have to follow it to make money.”
By the time the pandemic hit, Snider had decided if he wanted to get the sound he was hearing in his head, he would have to do it himself. In the fall, with the help of his road manager Brian Kincaid and engineer Colin Cargile, he transformed The Purple Building, his East Nashville headquarters, into a studio. Engineer Joe Bisirri came on board once they began tracking the album.
Snider played most of the instruments on First Agnostic Church’s 10 tracks, including electric bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, banjo and piano, and he also sang all the backing vocals. Multi-instrumentalist Robbie Crowell handled drums and percussion, and his ability to grok what Snider wanted was a key to the artistic success of the record.
“Now that I’ve finally figured out what I want, I see why as a folk singer it would be so hard to tell a drummer to be funky,” Snider says. “They’re thinking, ‘OK, you mean like “Up on Cripple Creek”?’ ‘No, like “Sex Machine.” ’ ‘And you’re going to play acoustic?’ ”
The album was mixed by award-winning producer-engineer Tchad Blake, who also added a few sonic and musical embellishments. “I was like a kid at Christmas,” Snider says. “I would send him a track and say, ‘This may not be done, but it’s as far as I can take it,’ and then I couldn’t wait to hear what he did with it.”
The album loosely tells the story of a wayward minister who discovers the meaning of life and starts a church — then bilks his congregation out of a lot of money and gets away with it. In the process, he learns that God has a wicked sense of humor. The album opens with “Turn Me Loose (I’ll Never Be the Same),” a quasi-tribute to longtime friend and inspiration Jerry Jeff Walker, who died while Snider was working on the album. It also includes elegies to two other lost friends, longtime mentor John Prine and Yonder Mountain String Band co-founder Jeff Austin.
Snider also offers some biting social commentary on the long, long fight for social justice in “The Battle Hymn of the Album.” He sings, “They say ‘Get down on the ground’ / ‘Get down on the ground’ / ‘Stop resisting, stop resisting,’ ” as the loping, gritty riff at the song’s foundation comes around again. He also addresses the wastefulness that led to the ocean-borne mountain of garbage he sings about in “That Great Pacific Garbage Patch”: “Throw your hands in the air / And wave them like you just don’t care / Because you don’t.”
Snider has a deep and broad catalog full of rich and thought-provoking songs. But he’s especially proud of First Agnostic Church, his 14th studio album of new material.
“I feel like I’ve always been trying to chase this sound, even though that’s not what I’m known for. I felt like sonically I sort of found my own spot in and among all the other people that do what I do, but I never felt like I had found a sound of my own. And with this record, I finally do.”
