Todd Snider was always good at finding a balance between absurd and profound. Throughout his career, he was a jokester with a sincere streak, as good at finding pathos in the guy carrying the boom box in Mike Tyson’s entourage as he was at voicing sly, righteous anger, or letting his wistful streak show every now and then. He had been working on new songs just before he died in November 2025 of pneumonia, shortly after a bizarre string of events in Salt Lake City that included him being beaten and robbed at the venue where he was scheduled to perform, haphazard medical care afterward in the emergency room of a local hospital, and a run-in with the police. Ten of those songs comprise My Second Rodeo. The tracks were incomplete when Snider died, but his band finished them with guidance from a cache of voice memos, emails, and demo recordings he left behind. Yet most of these songs still feel unfinished. That’s not a musical issue: Snider was often at his best with just his voice and an acoustic guitar, because the songs—and his delivery—were that good. Too often, the material here plays like an early draft still waiting for a polish. Snider apparently described the music he had been working on as “the sound of country music ten years from now.” That’s a stretch in basically every sense, starting with the fact that country music seems like it’s headed in the opposite direction from My Second Rodeo, which leans far more toward folk than country. An undercurrent of New Orleans-style soul also bubbles up here and there, emphasized by the horn charts accompanying some of these songs. The horns are loose and rowdy when they come in on the second half of “Stoner Yodel Number 3 (Give Me a D for Gym Class),” where they liven up bluesy guitar comping and plodding drums. They’re more integral in the opener “Freewheelin’ (Every Day at a Time),” where acoustic guitar and vocals make room for bright horns and a gospel-like chorus of backing vocals. It’s probably the most effective song on the album. The beat wanders a bit, but Snider’s lyrics are heartfelt—“Fought my way from just another likely story / To a cautionary tale,” he sings in a cracked murmur—and his assessment of his place in life, how he got there, and the freedom he felt comes across like an honest self-reckoning. Elsewhere, Snider is trying on “Solid Country Gold” to bring to life a scene inside a “shithole honky-tonk” without the spark or verve of his best work, and the conceit—that two people scrapping for a fight over politics could smooth over their differences with a good old-fashioned country song—skids past hopeful into hopelessly naive. A version of the guitar shuffle Snider plays on the song recurs later on “Can Your Monkey Do the Splits,” and again on “The Manifesto,” lending a sameness that slides by without making much of an impression. Snider finds a pulse on “One Nation Under Fire” with bolder guitars, layers of sweet female backing vocals, and a gusty saxophone solo, though he sings on the track like he has a mouthful of blueberries he’s trying not to chew. Maybe Snider could have corrected these shortcomings if he’d had more time to work on the songs. Alternatively, these songs may simply reflect where he was creatively in the last weeks of his life. Either way, this album is not the epitaph he deserves. For so much of his career, Snider was an original voice with an open heart, wearing his influences proudly and in a way that was uniquely his own. It’s not always easy to see that on My Second Rodeo. [Thirty Tigers] <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" src="https://www.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/05/PasteSectionBreak.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="100" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-431434" /> Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.