Country without borders
Brad Paisley is moving on from race controversy
Country music is supposed to be about real life, and in real life, Brad Paisley is sipping Perrier.
Will we ever get to hear a Paisley lyric about French bubbles in little green bottles? This is a man who hung his star over Nashville singing about the perils of ticks, tanning beds and online dating. So, yeah, maybe we will.
Nashville loves to agonize over what country music should and shouldn’t be, and that’s the tangled yarn ball Paisley’s been spinning on his finger for more than a decade. Of any country superstar working today, he’s the guy with the songs most intimately connected to the contemporary American experience — the blood, the sweat, the tears, the beers and everything else in the grocery bag.
He populates his lyric sheet with people who don’t normally appear in country songs, gilding their unfamiliar dramas in familiar melodies. Sometimes, there’s a political message. More often, there’s a punch line.
“I defuse everything I can with it,” Paisley says. “Humour is such a great shield. You’re going to get flak if you tell the wrong joke, but it’s still the wrong joke. Give the wrong speech, you take it on the chin.”
That’s exactly where Paisley took it in April 2013, when critics locked their ears on Accidental Racist, an earnest duet with rapper LL Cool J about racial healing that went wrong, then went viral. “I’m just a white man coming to you from the southland,” Paisley sings on the refrain, “trying to understand what it’s like not to be.”
The song was ridiculed by bloggers, blasted by critics, eviscerated by Stephen Colbert and parodied on Saturday Night Live. Then the great digital outrage machine did what it always does. It moved on to something else.
Paisley didn’t. “I’m still on a journey to learn this stuff,” the 41-yearold says, relaxing on his tour bus before a recent concert in Atlanta. “I want to hear what the professors and the pundits have to say. I had great conversations with a couple of people who were vocally upset, and I’m trying to learn what I can do better.”
As a songwriter, one of Paisley’s central themes has always been “taking pride in progress” — in America’s and, perhaps subconsciously, his own. Accordingly, his 11th album, Moonshine in the Trunk, out this week, finds him bouncing back from controversy while racing through the busiest summer of his life.
He’s been on tour, giving the late country legend Roger Miller a run for his money as a guitarist and a cut-up. He’s been on television, serving as a judge on ABC’s latest singing game show, Rising Star.
He’s been at home on his farm outside Nashville, soaking up time with his young sons, Huck and Jasper, and his wife, actress Kimberly Williams.
And he’s been online, executing his own rogue publicity campaign, leaking songs from Moonshine in the Trunk on Twitter, one by one.
He calls the album “a Mason jar half-full” — which means lots of drinking songs and lots of optimism.
And while the album’s excessive sunshine might seem a little tonedeaf to anyone who’s been following the news this summer, Paisley is far from oblivious. His music doesn’t just chronicle the current America. It envisions the America he wants to live in.
“Thinking, ‘Boy, are we blowing it, now’ — I don’t want to do that,” Paisley says.
“I have two little boys. I want to say, ‘Here are the possibilities.’ This is the best time to be alive in the history of our country. And hopefully, this isn’t as good as it gets.”
Paisley, who embarked on his songwriting career immediately after graduating from Belmont University in Nashville in 1995, has a knack for singing from other perspectives, sometimes playing an opinionated narrator on the brink of a big realization.
On the new album, there’s Gone Green — a song penned by Paisley’s bassist, Kenny Lewis — in which a redneck reluctantly embraces environmentalism in a world that’s “done gone green.” On 2013’s Those Crazy Christians, Paisley sings from the position of a grouchy atheist willing to admit that, “If I ever really needed help, well, you know who I’d call is those crazy Christians.”
And all those ditties about the ups and downs and upside-downs of alcohol? They’re inspired by the sloshiness Paisley sees at his concerts. He doesn’t drink much.
This tactic usually works pretty well, but something went awry with Accidental Racist. In the song, a guy in a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt (Paisley) walks into a Starbucks and places his order with a black barista (LL Cool J), realizing the Confederate flag on his chest is problematic.
Paisley’s lyrics stepped out into a minefield: “It ain’t like I can walk a mile in someone else’s skin,” while LL’s clunky response rhymes created dubious equivalencies. “If you don’t judge my gold chains,” he raps, “I’ll forget the iron chains.”
Paisley says the uproar that followed made him smarter.
“And contrary to popular belief, I wasn’t that dumb before,” he says. “But discussion is all you can ask for. That’s my biggest regret about that song: It became an argument and not a discussion.”