On Todd Snider's 2009 record The Excitement Plan, the song "Greencastle Blues" details the singer/songwriter's bust for marijuana possession, and it features his signature dark wit: "The number one symptom of heart disease is sudden death," for example, and "Some of this trouble just finds me / Most of this trouble I earned."
But in the performance and the words, there's also a complicated melancholy: "How do you know when it's too late to learn?"
In a recent phone interview, the 43-year-old Snider -- who co-headlines a show with Robert Earl Keen on Sunday at the Capitol Theatre -- made light of the bust. "I'm too old to be caught smoking pot," he said. "I don't think I'm too old to be smoking it, but too old to be caught smoking it."
Snider's songs tend to be like that -- funny, but rarely merely funny, with humor aspiring to truth.
