A friend recently said it best: “Todd Snider’s thought process – it is just totally different. The way he thinks…”
It is true. When you or I see a suit-dressed man in a $60,000 dollar car berating a teenage fast food drive-thru worker, our sympathies most likely stay with the kid. No matter how bad he messed up the suit’s order, he couldn’t deserve such harassment, could he?
Todd Snider tries to see the whole situation from the suit’s point of view – and the result is “Stuck on the Corner (Prelude to a Heart Attack)” – possibly one of the most challenging and culturally relevant songs to come out of the last year.
Set to a bluesy-shuffle that could have been stripped directly from Highway 61 Revisited, Snider uses first-person monologue to make a case for the suit’s bad behavior. What he paints is the portrait of a desperate man, made desperate by a job he hates, a loveless marriage, and spoiled kids. The refrain trembles, “Making money out of paper, making paper out of trees, making so much money we can hardly breathe…” 
In Sinder’s world, money is more likely to create problems than fix them and “Stuck on the Corner” gets his point across – but the wit and unlikely protagonist of the song saves it from becoming too preachy, allowing the audience to get the message and interpret it for themselves.
And to prove that it is not about the money, Snider gave away his “Peace Queer” EP (which includes this tune) for the first full month after it’s release. Now it is available on ITunes and other music outlets.
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