Todd Snider

I’ve been driving around 15 years making this shit up, singing it for anybody that’ll listen,” Todd Snider invariably tells the crowd toward the beginning of a performance. “Some of it’s sad, some of it’s funny, and sometimes I’ll go on for as many as 18 minutes in between the songs.” From there, the veteran songwriter’s set deviates nightly, as he spins stories both heartbreaking and uproarious via amiable babbling and deceivingly sophisticated songs. “This may sound pretentious, but it’s as if my heart is a wave that I’m trying to catch,” explains Snider, 39, on the phone from Nashville. “The hope is that I get away with it and they give me some dough and I can do it again the next night.”

Snider has been around since the early ’90s, but it was years after he was ejected from the major-label system that he grew into his talents. His last album, 2004’s East Nashville Skyline, became a critics’ favorite, and in August he’ll release a first-rate follow-up, The Devil You Know.

For Snider, who remembers his major-label tenure as an embarrassing period, the new album offers an unexpected chance to atone for perceived sins: It’s being released on a Universal imprint manned by his old bosses. “The fact that they asked me to come back,” he says, “lets me know my young-jerk period wasn’t that bad.”—Jay Ruttenberg

Todd Snider plays Canal Room August 16.