Todd Snider Died While Working on an Ambitious New Album. His Friends Finished It

“There was always something he was chasing,” says Robbie Crowell, who oversaw Snider's posthumous release My Second Rodeo with Joe Bisirri and Aaron Lee Tasjan

Before what would become Todd Snider’s final album hit a single streaming site or record-store shelf, the troubadour was already speaking with excitement about another one he had in the works. High, Lonesome and Then Some, released in October 2025, had been a sonic experiment in slow, mellow country melodies. “Now, we feel like we got it,” Snider told me at the time, “so now, I’m working on a new record.”

Barely a month later, that enthusiasm gave way to tragedy. Snider died on Nov. 14, 2025, at 59. His death happened two weeks after his release tour for High, Lonesome and Then Some was canceled following Snider’s involvement in a still-unclear incident in Salt Lake City that landed him in a hospital and in jail. Snider had been ailing from spinal stenosis and, before setting out on the road, he told Rolling Stone he was in pain and that the tour would likely be his last.

Snider had tapped Robbie Crowell, producer and member of Johnny Blue Skies; Joe Bisirri, engineer and producer; and the singer-songwriter Aaron Lee Tasjan to produce High, Lonesome and Then Some, and the record introduced a plodding country sound Snider had dubbed a “slow choogle.” He sought to refine it on his next project, but died before it was completed. In Crowell’s estimation, the album was 70 percent finished at the time of Snider’s died. Over the next year, he and Bisirri — with Tasjan playing guitar — worked to see the final 30 percent to its conclusion.

Earlier this month, they brought Snider’s last artistic vision into the world: My Second Rodeo is a 10-track LP of original songs that stands as the final studio album in which Snider was directly involved.

“I was kind of surprised at how fully realized it was in spite of the fact that he wasn’t there to finish it all the way through,” says Tasjan, who released his own superb album this year, Get Over It, Underdog. “It really felt like a record that he would have made, and that made me really happy.”

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My Second Rodeo was timed to Snider’s 60th birthday and a Todd Snider Day celebration in East Nashville that featured the renaming of the street in front of Snider’s Purple Building studio to “Todd Snider Way” and a block party showcasing one of Snider’s bands, the Eastside Bulldogs — which included Tasjan and Snider friends like Hayes Carll, Elizabeth Cook, and Tommy Womack. It capped a year of tributes large and small to the songwriter, including a “Todd Snider Rules!” set at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco a week before.

“Sitting side stage, alone, watching these people just show up, it made me feel like East Nashville’s about to be on fire for Todd,” Mike Snider — Todd’s brother and a longtime music executive — says of the block party.

For Bisirri, Crowell, and Tasjan, that sense of community that Snider fostered is what they were seeking when they set out to finish My Second Rodeo.

To work with, they had some of the most piercing lyrics Snider had ever written. The opening track, “Freewheelin’ (Every Day at a Time),” about a man who leaves his home bound for glory, is haunting in its context after the circumstances of Snider’s death. On “The Manifesto,” he sings with discernible anger about the scourge of school shootings in the United States. The title track, meanwhile, is a bluesy lament of a cowboy in a pickup truck, “with a kickass country song jacked up.”

My Second Rodeo picks up the “slow choogle” of the previous record, but there’s more of a focus this time around. Snider intended to tour off the album, and he wanted it to be something he could replicate in a solo show featuring only his guitar. So, Snider asked to cut his vocals and guitar first, and then have the band build around it. He expressed that vision in a series of emails he sent to the producers before he died.

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“There was always something he was chasing,” Crowell says. “Working with him was not a matter of like, making suggestions or giving direction. As a musician, it was more about piecing out what he was hearing, and trying to make that happen. He knew, but he didn’t, if that makes sense. There was a lot of trial and error, a lot of talking, and we’d have an email thread going.

“I think he dealt with a lot of producers earlier in his career, and it was a very standard thing where they’d come in and kind of put their stamp on it,” Crowell continues. “They’d make a record that was great — God, those records are all so, so good — but I remember at one point, he was like, ‘I never realized that I could be in charge.’”

Crowell says he pushed back against Snider’s idea of recording his vocals and guitar before the rest of the album. Over a series of emails, Snider dug in. He insisted on an album he could recreate by himself onstage.

“I love it,” Crowell says, reflecting on the finished product. “I’m really proud of it. It was an exceptionally difficult but rewarding undertaking. And Joe did so much. It was him that really did the deep diving through the voice notes, and he did a lot of amazing guitar work on it, and it was him going through it and picking the take…. And Todd’s writing got really distilled on these last couple of records. The lyrics are pretty sneakily crafty.”

It took Snider’s brother a while to listen to the album: Mike Snider says the demos and early versions were too rough on him. But when Bisirri sent him the final mix, he sat and played it start-to-finish.

“I had a vinyl press, and I put it on, and I just smiled,” he recalls. “It was so hard to listen to, because it’s so hard to hear his voice, right? So many times, I’ll put it on, and he starts to sing, and I’ll have to take it right off. But… I was so thrilled and blown away at how amazing it turned out and how great it sounded on vinyl. It just felt like an old, classic record, and my feeling was like, ‘Holy shit, he would be so happy with the way this sounds.’”

Aside from organized tributes, artists who were friends of Snider’s or simply influenced by him have gone out of their way to honor his legacy. His “Play a Train Song” alone has been covered by Jason Isbell, Carll, Robert Earl Keen, and Billy Strings in the past year (Cook and Carll sang it at the 2026 Americana Honors & Awards in September). Turnpike Troubadours covered “Just Like Old Times,” complete with a video from the Shooter Jennings-produced session, and other artists, including both Rhett Miller and Cody Canada, have written songs about Snider.

For his part, Tasjan has introduced a pre-show meet-and-greet to his concerts this year. Usually, such events are treated as add-ons, with VIPs often paying a premium to see artists play up close after sound check. Tasjan’s is free, but with a catch: It’s for fans of Todd Snider. Much of Tasjan’s career can be traced back to Snider’s mentorship, and he’s been inviting fans to show up early to hear him cover Snider and tell stories. He also asks fans to share their own memories of Snider. It’s as much for him and his own healing process as it is for them.

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“What Todd valued more than anything else was art for the sake of art,” Tasjan says. “In that way, creating something that is a tribute to him, about your experience with him or just what he meant to you personally or what his music meant to you — that is honoring him in the most elevated way that you possibly can. I encourage people to keep doing that, because he would love it so much. He would be so happy to know that the life he lived is inspiring people to create something of their own.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.