“A Love Letter to Handsome John” is Now Streaming
- Film features Todd Snider reminiscing about his friendship with John Prine
Todd Snider spoke - rather than wrote - his love letter to John Prine.
“I wanted to be John,” Snider says early in “A Love Letter to Handsome John,” the homemade, 55-minute film created by Snider’s friend Otis Gibbs and released on YouTube after a limited run in dozens of independent American theaters.
Filmed during a handful of sit-downs in the year leading up to Snider’s late-2025 death, the monologues feature a “baked,” pensive and distracted Snider reminiscing about his 20-year friendship and musical partnership with Prine and how he, Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver and Guy Clark accepted him as a lifer.
“They just knew I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Snider says in one of the film’s few funny moments.
Uncharacteristically unexcited and not at all animated, he talks circuitously about his first meeting with Prine, when Snider drove him to sessions for what would become the Missing Years. Before the “Love Letter” ends, Snider recalls their last couple of joint performances, including a 4/20 gig that featured “Illegal Smile.” That was the first time Prine told Snider he loved him and Snider figured Prine was sick, given the unexpected tenderness.
“He’s tough … as sensitive as his songs were,” Snider says of Prine.
Across the years, Snider was never able to let his guard down and fully be himself around Prine, because, “I revered him … I was just like, ‘yessir.’”
But Prine was good to Snider, going so far as to give - not sell - his publishing back after the latter left Oh Boy Records.
Snider’s death presumably left Gibbs with an unfinished movie and an only partially realized vision. As such, “Love Letter” features footage of Snider repeating himself and is padded with silent montages. It’s a fans-only product, but even fans might be left puzzled and/or disappointed but this disjointed affair.
But Gibbs doesn’t see it that way. He and Snider made the film for “the other (0).1 percent of people will love it,” he said in a statement.
“Those are our people,” Gibbs said. “The imperfect ones. The weirdos and the outsiders. They’ll be so damned grateful that we took the time to make this. No matter how flawed and ramshackled it is (and it is.) They’ll appreciate it and support it.”
