Thinking out loud

When you run away from home at 16, it takes skills to work what Todd Snider calls “the couch circuit” -- especially if you’re still trying to finish high school. You’ve got to earn every couch you crash on after gigs with charisma and salesmanship, and it doesn’t hurt if you’re a born entertainer.

Or a smart aleck. Now 39, Snider has been a folk-rock troubadour for more than 20 years, brandishing wit like Randy Newman and barstool cool like Kris Kristofferson, saying, “It feels like the same grift it was when my hat was on the floor.”

Admittedly, his new album, “The Devil You Know,” has changed that a little. Its dry, irrepressible first single, “Looking for a Job” (with the wonderful line, “I was looking for a job when I found this one”), has already whipped up enough buzz to continue the success of his breakthrough 2004 album, “East Nashville Skyline.” A new video for the sardonic yarn “You Got Away With It (A Tale of Two Fraternity Brothers),” which is about a certain hard-partying Yalie and current president of the United States, will only stoke the college-chart fury. So no more couches.

There are nice hotel rooms now, and cable TV at home.

But a lifetime of rootlessness has consequences, good and bad. Snider says he started off this album ticked off about not having a strong sense of where he’s from, or any certainty of his spiritual life, and wanted to end it with a reconciliation to the drift. In the lead track, a rambunctious acoustic-guitar rocker called “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” Snider sings, “I know where I’m going when I get to where I’m going / what I’m doing when I get done.”

By the last track, though, “Happy New Year,” Snider seems to have exorcised some kind of demon. A midtempo storytelling song, with Snider talking as much as singing -- the kind of John Prine-like folksy track he’s best at, like his 1994 song “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues” -- it tells a story of spiritual epiphany, of a man relieved to announce that religious dogma can lead to bad politics and false security. “On the last track, I wanted to say: I’m going out on a limb here and say we don’t know for sure. Not just me, but all of us,” he says.

It might just be the right time for fiercely questioning both religion and politics. Snider’s funny and lighthearted approach is drawing bigger and bigger audiences, and Universal’s year-old New Door label has big hopes it’ll make an impression on the college crowd and on those hungry for a songwriter with radical honesty.

“I think it’s the outlaw, outsider appeal, and that could be very broad,” says Richie Gallo, executive vice president for New Door. “He’s a wonderful storyteller, like a Harry Chapin in the 1970s, who spun stories that were not radio-friendly, necessarily, but at a time when people were looking for more than just music; they were looking for lyrics as well.”

As part of that message, Snider has the folkie’s reverence for history, which he employs to compelling effect on “Thin Wild Mercury,” a retelling of a spat when Bob Dylan threw fellow folk luminary Phil Ochs out of his limo because Ochs said Dylan’s first forays into rock with the Band weren’t very good.

The two were en route to a party, and after that exchange of opinion, Dylan stopped the limo and famously said to Phil, “You’re not a writer, you’re a journalist,” and told him to get out. Snider and his journalist-musician friend Peter Cooper wrote the song when they were debating whether Dylan or Ochs would regret that fight the most.

“We decided it would be a tie,” Snider says. “But I’m one of those obsessives -- I’m sure I’m on a list somewhere that says I have to stay 300 feet from Bob Dylan.” In an America of too-earnest emo rock and too-saccharine pop, Snider’s straightforward melodies and funny lyrics are a tonic. Like his favorites Prine, Newman, Jerry Jeff Walker and Steve Earle, he never forgets his job is to entertain. After all, without that, there’s no couch. Despite his laconic, spacey delivery, his barfly smarts never let him forget how it feels to be in the audience.

“I’m like, I wasn’t coming here for an answer,” says Snider, who plays the Troubadour on Thursday. “I just came here to celebrate questions with ya.”

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Todd Snider

Where: Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Thursday

Price: $20

Contact: (310) 276-6168