Worth More Dead Than Alive: The Life and Death of Todd Snider — 2Pac, Biggie, Britney, Elvis & the Professional Artist

Todd Snider passed away in mid-November. If you don’t know who that is, it’s because Todd Snider was a folk singer, and most people in the world don’t pay much attention to folk singers these days — even ones at the top of their game.

I see Todd as part of a lineage of American troubadours, dating back as far as I know to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly — itinerant, train-hopping performers in Dust Bowl–era America — leading through to Jerry Jeff Walker, John Prine, Jimmy Buffett, Shel Silverstein, Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, and Willie Nelson.

Without ever achieving, nor seeking, tabloid-level fame, Todd Snider built a 30-year career and multimillion-dollar empire touring the country with a guitar and harmonica, singing thousands of songs he wrote himself — each with its own hilarious and heartwarming story.

At the time of his death, Snider was 59 years old, at the start of a tour for his new album, still creating and performing, seemingly as prolific as ever. Sidelined by spinal stenosis (from what I’ve read), he had taken a recent break from touring and instead released an onslaught of live video recordings from “The Purple Building,” the East Nashville music studio he owned and created.

Cloaked beneath a veil of self-deprecating humor and the whimsical tones of a “stoner,” Snider probably didn’t seem to most people like the visionary behind an artistic empire — but he was exactly that. After tussling with record labels for complete creative control of his albums and tours, he eventually created Aimless, Inc., his own label, through which he released thousands upon thousands of original songs and toured for decades — releasing dozens of albums and averaging 150 shows per year across America and around the globe.

Eventually making his home in East Nashville in the early 2000s, he became a sort of local founder and godfather of what became its own folk-hippie / alt-country movement — or as Snider put it himself, “what they used to refer to as unsuccessful country music.”

In the years that followed, a score of music venues opened in the neighborhood, featuring the acts of Todd and his friends. They toured together and even held a sleepaway summer camp in the mountains for songwriters and aspiring songwriters. I had tentative plans to attend in 2026.

More immediately, and closer to home, I was planning to attend Todd’s gig in Santa Cruz on his 2025 winter tour — December 14 — but that gig never came.

About a month beforehand, at the tour’s first show in Salt Lake City, Utah, the show — and then the entire 2025 leg of the tour — was canceled. A post on his Instagram account, which always seemed to be run by a third party at Aimless, Inc., first announced that Todd had been assaulted outside his hotel and that there would be no show. A subsequent post announced that the injury was severe and that the tour would be canceled through the end of the year.

Then, a few days later, a video surfaced on TMZ — police bodycam footage of Todd Snider being arrested for refusing to leave a Salt Lake City hospital, trying to explain to officers and hospital staff that he wasn’t homeless or a drug addict, but a well-known musician whose band had “ditched him” after he took an unexplained blow, leaving him in the hospital with staples in his head.

Police cuffed his arms behind him, put him in the back of a cop car, and drove him away.

A week later, he was dead.

In the time between, he had been released from jail and flown back home to Nashville, where he went to the hospital and was diagnosed with walking pneumonia and sepsis — according to everything I’ve been able to find.

A nameless person at Aimless, Inc. again made an announcement on his Instagram page, telling fans of his death. A couple of days later, they posted again — this time to announce that t-shirts and other items from the online store, which had sold out, were now back in stock.

I don’t know who made those decisions, or in what order they were made, but the proximity of those two announcements struck me hard.

What the hell happened to Todd Snider? Who was the tour manager or business manager who made the decision to abandon the man in a hospital on the road — to send his bus, his band, and his staff home without him? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I can’t stop asking them.

Was there some kind of fight between Todd and the people he hired to support him and manage his business? Is it the same person or people running his online store — the same person or people running his Instagram account? These are assumptions forming in the absence of information, but the silence itself feels meaningful.

Snider divorced in 2015. He had no children. No direct heirs of any kind. As far as I can tell, his last weeks were spent dying alone, with the people he was paying to help him looking the other way — putting their own destination ahead of his.

It’s hard to make sense of all this.

I never met Todd Snider. I never knew him at all. I don’t know what he may have been like to be around and work for on a daily basis, or on the kind of 24/7 basis required on a tour. I’m aware that my picture of him is constructed entirely from his work and from a distance.

From all his stories and from his enormous body of work, he seemed like a really kind, generous, and sensitive guy. That may be incomplete — but it’s the version of him that matters to me.

This is where my mind goes when I think about power and neglect — not because the stories are identical, but because the pattern feels familiar.

From Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker, to Bob Dylan and Al Grossman, 2Pac and Suge Knight, Notorious B.I.G. and Puff Daddy, Britney Spears and her parents — it seems that any musician worth his salt has war stories (if they survived them at all) duking it out with a producer or manager figure who at first appears as an ally, friend, and necessary business partner, but later shows such carelessness toward the principal’s well-being that it results in extreme harm — and in many cases, even death.

In Todd Snider’s case, it is absolutely unheard of for a tour to abandon its principal on the road — even in cases where the artist is missing shows due to drug addiction or other personal recklessness. From my understanding of touring culture, the job of everyone on tour is to support the artist responsible for the tour.

In Snider’s case, he didn’t even have an outside record label in charge of personnel, but his own company, founded to give him complete creative control. With no further insight into the inner workings of Aimless, Inc., it appears to me that there was some kind of relational breakdown between the man responsible for everyone being there and the people responsible for supporting the man and his work.

It seems to me that something broke down where Snider was no longer being treated primarily as a human being, but as the source of an income stream — and that consciously or subconsciously, those involved became very OK with a reality in which his death required less care than his life.

That brings me to the Notorious B.I.G. and Puff Daddy, and also to 2Pac and Suge Knight.

Leading up to their respective murders, both Combs and Knight, as heads of their record labels, profited — along with their artists — from the publicity and drama generated by an escalating feud. Rather than settle the conflict, consciously or subconsciously, both men chose the path of greatest financial reward: stoking the flames through interviews and through the involvement of other artists on their labels.

In the spirit of that same carelessness — if not outright maliciousness — someone within 2Pac’s orbit tipped off his whereabouts to someone who turned out to be an assassin. On the East Coast, Biggie met the same fate.

Knight and Combs and their companies went on to reap hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of decades — all without ever having to deal with a difficult artist again.

Did Suge Knight or Sean Combs or whoever is at the helm of Aimless, Inc. “fire the gun” or “plan the hit” or “whack the songwriter over the head”? Probably not — directly or indirectly. But did their carelessness, cold-heartedness, and devotion to profit prevent them from understanding how to care for a human being in their most vulnerable moments? Absolutely.

What’s the takeaway? Is there a takeaway?

I was telling all this to a woman I met at a Christmas party at my neighbor’s house. She said I needed to use Todd Snider’s death as an opportunity to make a change in my life. She’d never heard of Todd Snider, and she’d never met me before either, I should mention.

She went on to tell me that the change I needed to make was to stop drinking and stop smoking pot. I should also mention that I was smoking a blunt at the time, with a Jell-O shot in my other hand — though she was drinking a beer herself.

Some people miss the point entirely.

For me, I decided that what I needed to do was to make my life about creating and sharing as much art and music as possible — to watch my back for Judas’s and Brutus’s and their equally dangerous cousin, Carelessness — and never to lose myself the way Suge Knight, Sean Combs, Colonel Tom Parker, Al Grossman, and Britney Spears’s parents did: so blinded by commerce and money and whatever else is popular and worshipped in our society that they lose track of the soul — the one true spirit behind the art and the person responsible for bringing everyone together in the first place.

As for buying a Todd Snider t-shirt from his company after his death, I decided instead to make my own with a sharpie (shown in the photo above) - since none of the money would be going to Todd anyway. I think he would have wanted it that way.