On their self-titled debut, Hard Working Americans perform the sort of unobtrusive trick that only the most self-effacing of supergroups can pull off, and this has almost everything to do with good old Nashville songwriting, though a few outliers creep in. If supergroups can have a leader, this band's sound is defined by Todd Snider's singing — and that doesn't begin to account for his ability to select appropriate material. Gathering a set of gamy, funny songs that they render in a hybridized Southern-rock style, Snider & Co. make a case for the concept of repertory-based, interpretive performance in an era of great and unheralded tunesmiths.
Hard Working Americans honors country singer Frankie Miller along with Randy Newman, whose "Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)" gets a slight rearrangement. Cut in California at Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir's TRI Studio, the record rocks out even as it rolls over tunes by Chuck Mead, Will Kimbrough, Hayes Carll and Kevin Gordon. Taking a poke at the skin and bones of an undernourished American reality, the songs constitute a narrative, and guitarist Neal Casal contributes Jerry Garcia-style guitar licks to tracks that move along in unpretentious fashion.
Snider had previously toured with famed jam band Widespread Panic and gotten to know the group's bassist, Dave Schools. Having collected a set of around 25 songs penned by such tunesmiths as Carll, Colin Linden and Tommy Womack, Snider wondered what to do with them.
"I'd saved them over the years," Snider tells the Scene from his Nashville home, "and in my mind, I had this idea that I was gonna have a girl who was kick-ass but didn't want to make up her own songs. But also in my mind, I was seein' them like they could be an album — one that I could say, 'All these songs, for some reason, when I sing 'em, I have a very specific person I'm hoping to hear me sing them.' "
Snider's feel for the grimy nuance of marginal existence transpires throughout Hard Working Americans, and the playing never gets in the way. Drummer Duane Trucks interacts with Schools in exemplary fashion on the record's opening track, "Blackland Farmer," which Frankie Miller first cut in 1956. With Chad Staehly's electric piano and Casal's psychedelic guitar riding on top, the track establishes the mood of a record devoted to reconstruction and deconstruction.
"The first song we cut in the studio, we deconstructed [Kevn Kinney's] 'Straight to Hell,' and took it sort of to church," says Schools, who produced Americans. "Once we got the master take, it was like, 'Wow, this is easy.' Most of the time, it's not."
Schools says Kinney was a guest in the studio the day the band mixed down "Straight to Hell," and the songwriter seems to have approved of the way the group interpreted his composition. "He was able to hear what we did with his song, and it really vindicated the methodology that Todd and I were using," says Schools. "We were tearing those songs down to their essence and then rebuilding them in our own way."
It's a record of bargain-basement dreams, complete with first-rate guitar solos. They rock and roll during Carll's "Stomp and Holler," while Mead and Don Herron's "Run a Mile" sports an intro that turns the beat around. Still, "Run a Mile" is not exactly good-time rock — it's a tale of Alabama-style vigilante justice that Snider delivers in a scared, slightly coarse voice. Elsewhere, Snider and band reinterpret Brian Henneman and Scott Taylor's "Welfare Music," which describes the life of a woman who "buys cassette tapes in the bargain bin."
For Snider — a great singer-songwriter himself — making Hard Working Americans seems to have been a labor of love, as well a master class in songwriting.
"I'm hoping that now that I've done this, I can take some of my own words," he says. "I haven't come up with a chorus for any of it, because my hope is to learn more about, I guess what you call it is composition, or something."
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