CMT Blog: Brad Paisley

The day I wrote a blog about how God says no to your prayers sometimes was the last time I talked to my parish's pastor about country music. It was actually the last time I talked to him, period. He died suddenly yesterday (Aug. 11). And I am struggling with the fact that our last conversation was about country music. I mean, shouldn't we have been talking about something more reverent? Shouldn't I have been asking him why bad things happen to good people? Or some other religious question that holier Christians ponder?

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The Desert Rose Band returned to Nashville for the first time in 20 years last night (Aug. 9), arriving to a full Belcourt Theatre -- and eager fans like Emmylou Harris and Brad Paisley at their side. Lead singer Chris Hillman told the crowd that the band decided to reunite for the music's sake, with no intentions of making another record, so there was no new, unfamiliar material to politely sit through. Instead, the dynamic band capably and cheerfully rolled through their country hits from the late 1980s, like the fully-charged "Ashes of Love" (with Paisley taking a verse), "Love Reunited," "One Step Forward," "He's Back and I'm Blue," "Summer Wind" and "I Still Believe in You." As soon as they kicked off the first song, "She Don't Love Nobody," I just couldn't quit smiling. They've still got that cool California vibe, yet with an obvious affinity for traditional country music.

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What did we do before Twitter? Seriously. It gives country fans so much random but hysterical nuggets of information. And it's not just Blake Shelton, Dierks Bentley and Brad Paisley who are cracking people up. Girls are getting in on it, too. This weekend, Miranda Lambert sent out a tweet after her show on Saturday (Aug. 7) night that said, "Soooo.....some crazy girl showed her boobs to us all night while we were on stage. And they were not the pretty kind. Ew!" That was about the same time that Kellie Pickler was on her tour bus rolling down the highway saying, "can't quit looking down at my left hand and thanking God that I get to spend the rest of my life with @kylecjacobs." Martina McBride tweeted a little movie of her husband (and an audience) singing "Happy Birthday" to her. Even LeAnn Rimes, who is back on Twitter after a week-long hiatus, was retweeting the always-pensive John Mayer, with his quote, "I have found the key to a happy life is to surround myself with like-minded people who agree with me constantly."

Little Huck Paisley only sings one word. "Me." But it may be the single most touching word in this brilliantly moving song that Brad Paisley is about to release to radio. It's called "Anything Like Me," and the way Paisley describes it, it's about the double-edged-sword moment when a man realizes he's going to have a son. "You're excited you're having a boy. But then you think about what you did and the horror sets in," he says.

So as the song goes along, from the telltale ultrasound to the son leaving home for good, it is just an all-out cry-fest for me. Because I have a son. One who has done almost everything in this song, including the melting of Tonka trucks with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. (He also figured out how to burn holes in leaves that day, but Paisley can't include every little-boy pastime in his song.) The song's not just about how boys will be boys. It's about a father getting payback if and when his son ends up anything like him.

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One of the readings at Mass yesterday (July 25) was about Abraham bargaining with God. So naturally, the homily was all about how often people bargain with God when they pray. Like, "Hey God, if you do this for me I swear I'll work at a soup kitchen and feed the homeless for a hundred years." Anyway, because country music is usually always on my mind, I found myself thinking about Brad Paisley's song, "No." It's a song that Paisley wrote with Bill Anderson and Jon Randall and it pulls you in with a duet of piano and steel guitar. The lyrics are about how every prayer you pray gets answered, even though sometimes the answer is no. So Paisley doesn't get the bike he prayed for, he doesn't get away with smoking some stolen cigarettes and at the end he doesn't get to keep his Grandpa here on earth when he is called on home.

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If you are heading to the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.V., for the PGA event this week (July 26-Aug. 1), and you are a country fan, this is pretty much going to be the best week of your life. To kick off this inaugural golf tournament, native son Brad Paisley, Carrie Underwood, Rascal Flatts and Reba McEntire will be performing for attendees and participants at the new outdoor amphitheatre at the State Fair of West Virginia. (I think by "attendees," they mean that you have to go to the tournament and you can't just go to the concert. That said, you could go feign an interest in golf for a couple hours then head over to the show. Right?) The concert schedule has changed a little since it was first announced, so now Reba takes the stage on Wednesday (July 28), Rascal Flatts on Thursday (July 29) and the biggie is the double-headliner show on Saturday (July 31) with Paisley and Underwood. You get access to the concerts with your all-access weekly badge for just $147. The concerts are general admission, but still. That's comes out to only about $37 a headliner, plus a bunch of golf, if you're into that kind of thing.

Concert ticket sales are down 17 percent this year, compared to the first half of 2009. And then there's country. The Tennessean has a great story about how so many major concert tours are suffering the same recessionary woes as the rest of the world, but how country concerts from the likes of Brad Paisley and Taylor Swift are actually doing quite well, thank you very much. The story attributes that to the cheaper seats, but having just shelled out $250 for a Dixie Chicks/Keith Urban/Eagles ticket, I don't buy that. I personally think maybe country fans are just that loyal, and would gladly make sacrifices before they'd miss a show. Clarence Spalding, who manages Jason Aldean and Brooks & Dunn, said, "A lot of acts out there from the pop and rock side are getting the crap beat out of them, and a lot of it's about the high ticket prices. I don't think you should look at it like we're not making money from the record business so, in turn, you need to jack up ticket prices. If that's your strategy, it's not a great strategy, and it's going to turn away fans."

Photo credit: Ed Rode

At the very end of Justin Moore's new video for "How I Got to Be This Way," he says, "Everything in this song is true." Wow. So now I feel like I know all the mistakes he's made and how they've all shaped who he is today. It's kind of his own personal broken road. One full of drunk driving, broken hearts, bad deals, fighting over girls and getting kicked in the face by a horse. The live shots are from the Detroit Hoedown outdoor festival and the Brad Paisley tour, while other parts of the video were shot at an old warehouse in East Nashville. In between shots of Moore singing, there are a handful of snapshots from his childhood, which is a powerful way to demonstrate how those pretty stupid things could make a man out of a kid.

By the time you're reading this blog entry, I will be aboard the Barefoot Lady Pontoon Excursion, deep in the crystal clear waters of a Wisconsin lake. As you might imagine, I elected myself Music Director and put together a playlist of songs to thoroughly entertain my friends and me as we cruise up and down and around this lake. But I didn't want to make it all about the patriotic weekend, because we'll have enough of that on Sunday. Nor did I want to make it all fun-in-the-sun songs, since too many of those can feel like you are actually trying to turn your day into a country song. But now that I look at this mix I've come up with, I realize I'm a little heavy on the good-time songs, so please add a few I-Heart-America songs to the list to balance it out.

"Water," Brad Paisley
"Redneck Yacht Club," Craig Morgan
"Drive (For Daddy Gene)," Alan Jackson
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Joe Nichols' album, Man With a Memory, popped up in my music shuffle at home a few days ago. And as soon as I heard the opening notes of "The Impossible," I decided to stop what I was doing and just chill out and listen to the whole thing. His easygoing major label debut was released in 2002, right around the time I got this job. Our first interview was kind of awkward -- there wasn't much to talk about, except that we both liked traditional country music and that he once sold steaks door-to-door prior to getting his record deal. Since then, he's loosened up a lot and turned out to be one of the funniest guys in the business. To me, his quick wit ranks right up there with Vince Gill and Brad Paisley.

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