"Lost" album from Todd Snider, featuring previously unreleased songs, recordings, and versions. For the uninitiated, Todd Snider's most hard-core fans are affectionately known as "Shitheads." If you're a Shithead, you may have heard of an album called Crank It, We're Doomed, the 2007 album Snider shelved before its release for artistic reasons. Crank It, We're Doomed was recorded during an especially fertile period for Snider, and after he decided not to release it, he included five of the tracks on his next two albums - Peace Queer and The Excitement Plan. Snider was trying out new ideas during the Crank It sessions. He experimented with the garage rock sounds he would explore further in coming years as Elmo Buzz and the Eastside Bulldogs. He also mixed folk and funk concepts for the first time, a blend he experimented with for more than a decade before perfecting it on 2021's groundbreaking First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder. So if nothing else, Crank It, We're Doomed is a historically important album because it foreshadowed much of what followed. Snider has spoken to me at length over the years about Crank It, We're Doomed, but I was never able to hear the unreleased album because neither he, nor any of his team, had a copy. Nor did Eric McConnell, who co-produced, engineered and played on the album, which was recorded at his East Nashville studio. Admittedly, the fact neither Snider nor McConnell had a copy of the album seemed remarkable - unbelievable even. Of course it's believable that the self-professed stoner hippie Snider didn't have a copy, but the fact McConnell didn't have a copy either just added to the album's mythos. At one point a few years ago, Snider gave me a list of seventeen songs that may have been on the record, but he couldn't say for certain which songs made the final sequence or what the sequence was. So it remained the stuff of myth, Snider's great lost album. But recently Snider got some good news: Mastering engineer Jim DeMain had a copy of the Crank It, We're Doomed stereo masters. So I finally got to hear his lost album. Snider once told me he was going for an Exile On Main Street meets Desire musical vibe on Crank It, We're Doomed, and that's an apt description of the sonic space the record occupies. He recorded the album with the cadre of musicians with whom he made East Nashville Skyline and The Devil You Know: guitarist Will Kimbrough, drummer Paul Griffith, violinist Molly Thomas, and either McConnell or Peter Cooper on bass. In addition, Jimmy Wallace played keys. The album's final sequence features fifteen tracks, although Snider recorded other songs during the Crank It sessions that didn't make the cut. His cover of Robert Earl Keen's "Corpus Christi Bay" that appeared on The Excitement Plan was among those other songs he recorded during the sessions.
November 2023
