Todd Snider

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You don't often hear about an artist reinventing their sound twenty albums into a celebrated career. But for Todd Snider, his latest release, First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder, isn't so much a sudden change in direction as an arrival after years of searching.

Since debuting in 1994, Snider has gone through his own incarnations. His first single "Talking Seattle Blues" was a head fake that might've pointed to goofy novelty songs. But he quickly showed that his artistic quiver was much deeper and more interesting. A storyteller who works a similar creative soil to John Prine and Shel Silverstein, Snider's best songs are both sad and funny, political and entertaining, and always written with a poet's eye and a stand-up comedian's sensibility about the follies of human condition. While he's made twenty fine albums, it's on stage where Snider is even more potent, with between-song banter that weaves subtle emotional threads through his sets.

The other key framing device for the new songs is the album's colorful title. "If the gods of folk didn't want no funk, they shouldn't have started none," Snider says with a chuckle. "2020 was a terrible year, and it kept taking people that I loved. So I kept feeling funky, and the church idea came out of that. I've always had the First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder in mind. Aren't we always hoping for something and wondering 'What the fuck?' We hope there's a God. We wonder if there is. We hope you're coming. We wonder if you will."

Colorado singer-songwriter Daniel Rod­­riguez turns to his acoustic guitar for memorable, melodic hooks to accompany his poetic and contemplative folk songs. Boulder Weekly refers to Rodriguez's voice as "timeless... deep and hearty, weathered but comforting." With over a decade under his belt as one of the founding members and lead songwriters of the transcendental folk band, Elephant Revival, Rodriguez is well-versed in the Americana tour circuit. Before going on hiatus, after their third headlining Red Rocks show in May 2018, Elephant Revival had released six albums and performed countless shows and festivals across the nation as well as overseas. Rodriguez released his debut album, Sojourn of a Burning Sun, in 2020.