Devil makes three

Sex Swing

Devil Makes Three stopped by the 88.1 KDHX studio in Saint Louis on November 5,2013 to perform live for Bittersweet Melody. Audio by Dan Kinney. Discover more great media at http://kdhx.org

Devil Makes Three "Spinning Like a Top" Live at KDHX 11-5-13

Devil Makes Three "40 Days" Live at KDHX 11-5-13

THe Devil Makes Three All Hail

Roy Williams, Abby Hollander, Jeff Picker (feat. birds)

John Prine - Paradise

The Devil Makes Three - "Man Tap"

Abby the Spoon Lady (one of the few professional musical spoon players in the country) and Banjo Ben perform their outstanding version of the folk-music standard "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" in downtown Asheville, NC.

Abby The Spoon Lady and Ben Shirley - "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss"

John Prine, Johnny Burns, Tom Pickles Piekarski, Howard Levy and Angie Varias.
What a band! There was always a wrestling match at the mic with John. He was hard to follow, especially when he was pushing me off the mic with his head!

John Prine - September 78 - 08 Please Don't Bury Me

The Ones We Love

Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables is Todd Snider’s inspirational album.

“I want to inspire people,” Snider says. “I want to inspire them to leave home, to do things traditionally considered wrong. If you listen to my record and vandalize your school, godspeed. If you listen to my record and punch your stepdad, thank you, you’ve made me feel better about
what I do. I don’t believe in the American dream, and family values can suck my asshole’s balls.”

Snider says this while smiling, because he says most things while smiling, because he knows family values are unlikely to do such a thing, and because he’s on the happy back end of happy hour at a favorite East Nashville bar. He’s laughing but not necessarily kidding, and Agnostic
Hymns & Stoner Fables is anything but a nice, folk/Americana troubadour album. It’s not a nice anything.

It is jagged, leering, lurching and howling, and filled with unhappy endings both experienced and intimated: “It ain’t the despair that gets you, it’s the hope,” he sings in the album-closer, “Big Finish.” That Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables is also roaringly funny is tribute to Snider’s unique sensibilities, and to his standing as what Rolling Stone magazine calls “America’s sharpest musical storyteller.” Anguish without laughter is boring, like intensive care without morphine, and Snider has never been within 100 miles of boring. Also, he didn’t earn the
attention, friendship and fandom of American musical giants like Kris Kristofferson and John Prine by writing mopey protest songs.

Anyway, these aren’t protest songs. They’re inspirational. We’ve covered that already, right? It’s populated mostly by losers in the midst of losing, with a couple of spotlight appearances from the humbly anointed 1 percent. The result is something disconcerting, cracked and wholly original. It’s something that stands apart from the music of Snider’s heroes, and from Snider’s own, much-celebrated past. Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables is Snider’s 12th album (14th, if we count a “best of” set and a collection of B-sides and demos.

Snider doesn’t talk around the vulnerable part, or the angry part, or the part about how everything we’re taught about goodness and righteousness and capitalism, about God and family values winds up exploding into violence and chaos, wonder and longing. He doesn’t talk around how the whole deal is enough to make you vandalize your school, punch your stepdad, or make lewd suggestions as to just what family values might do in their spare time. And he doesn’t talk around the part about how he doesn’t know any more than you do about any of these things, or the part about how he might be wrong. It’s just that nothing has been delivered yet, nothing revealed. It is, as he sings, too soon to tell.

Here are 10 new songs for the waiting room. They’re here to inspire.

06 In Between Jobs

The devil makes three- Tow

Pickin' On Nirvana

All Apologies (feat. Iron Horse)

Allman Brothers Band live at Wanee Music Festival in Live Oak, Florida
2 sets (April 16 & 17, 2010)

The devil makes three- Tow

bilioso-1

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