PAISLEY USES STAR POWER TO BACK UKRAINE
COUNTRY MUSICIAN, WHO PERFORMS SATURDAY AT TEMECULA VALLEY FESTIVAL, RECOUNTS HOW HIS COLLABORATION WITH ZELENSKYY LED TO A FACE-TO-FACE MEETING IN KYIV
Most country singers avoid any topic that could bring them even the slightest bit of backlash. Brad Paisley has never been one of those country singers. In recent months, Paisley has become the most outspoken Nashville star in support of Ukraine after the Russian invasion last year, culminating last month when he joined a bipartisan delegation of senators — Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska — for a trip to Kyiv and in-person meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
During a news conference in St. Michael’s Square, Paisley broke out his guitar and played “Same Here,” his new song that features a spoken-word cameo from Zelenskyy, and sang the chorus of John Denver’s “Country Roads.”
“All of the things I’ve done in the last few months have been — well, every single one of them is kind of an impossible thing to have happened,” Paisley said in a phone interview. “And they’re all happening.”
Paisley is the main headliner this weekend at the Temecula Valley Balloon & Wine Festival. He’ll perform Saturday night on a bill that includes Sara Evans and Tenille Arts.
It started last year when Paisley, haunted by images of people forced to leave their homes at the start of the war, wrote a ballad called “Same Here” — about how everyone really wants the same things out of life, including the desire for freedom — with Lee Thomas Miller and Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith.
He wanted to have someone sing in Ukrainian at the end of the track, but then had an even crazier idea: Would Zelenskyy have any interest in appearing on the song? Through a complicated series of connections that Paisley declines to describe in detail, he discovered that, yes, the president was interested. So after a tremendous amount of back and forth, they scheduled a Zoom call.
“I had a great, 45-minute talk with him — we discussed everything we could think of and really got into the details of who we are, and our families. It was a really eye-opening thing,” Paisley said. The conversation was off the record except for an exchange, included in the song, in which Zelenskyy says that even though they speak different languages, they appreciate the same things: “Children, freedom, our flag, our soldiers, our people, the biggest treasure we have.”
“At the end of it, he said, ‘I hope you come over and see our people.’ And that’s what really stuck with me . ... He just went on and on and on about how he feels about them, and obviously he feels every bit the pride he should in these folks,” Paisley said.
Paisley is now an ambassador for United24, Zelenskyy’s crowdfunding effort to rebuild Ukrainian homes, and is friends with the senators in the delegation. When they offered him a spot on the trip, he immediately agreed.
“I would have moved heaven and earth. I said, ‘Now that you invited me, you can’t stop me. I’m going.’ ”
Paisley, 50, occupies a rarefied spot after 20-plus years in country music. He has a long string of No. 1 hits and platinum albums, and he was the face of the Country Music Association Awards for a decade as co-host with Carrie Underwood. He plays arenas around the world, and his music runs the gamut from deeply romantic ballads (“Then”) to the silliest songs you can imagine (“Ticks”) to songs that tackle heavy topics such as childhood cancer (“One of Those Lives”) and the opioid crisis
(a new song on his upcoming album about the epidemic in West Virginia: “If living here don’t kill ya, the medicine will”).
But Paisley’s inspiration for “Same Here” stems from a theme he’s been fixated on throughout his career: the version of ourselves that we present to the world and the real version behind the scenes, and how, at our core, everyone is pretty similar.
That approach worked to great effect on his all-encompassing 2011 album “This Is Country Music” but has also gone very poorly. Who can forget the instant backlash for “Accidental Racist,” his 2013 duet with LL Cool J about race relations that was derided as tone-deaf? Now, he hopes that he can capture listeners’ attention to ponder the deeper meaning of “Same Here.”
“I’m not just singing about driving down a country road or something. I’m asking a question in the song about our similarities,” Paisley said. “And I got the answer firsthand, which was really inspiring to see that we’re as similar as I thought we were.”
Paisley describes the trip to Kyiv as “haunting,” though maybe not why you would expect. He wasn’t sure what he was going to encounter when he got there —
he was picturing that maybe he would get off the train and there would be rubble everywhere like in a movie.
And while some parts of the city still show the aftermath of the attacks, he said, you can walk right into another area and it’s “just stunning,” like the European cities he’s toured his whole career. That’s what he can’t stop thinking
about: Seeing the Ukrainian citizens going about their daily lives, just like him, except they’re living between air raid sirens.
The senators had to attend meetings, Paisley said, so he got the longer tour of the city. He said that his guides showed him a photo of where a missile left a “20-foot crater” in the middle of an intersection in downtown Kyiv — and now, except for some broken windows and plywood, you would never know that happened. People just walked and drove past the area on their way to work, as always.
“I saw kids in their raincoats with their bookbags getting off the bus, going home from school that afternoon. The Nike store was open,” Paisley said. “They just want freedom and the ability to control their own fate.”
Performing his music in St. Michael’s Square was a surreal and “insane” experience, Paisley said, as he told the reporters gathered that he was struck by the resilience of life and how the city was trying to thrive during the conflict. It wasn’t until he left — the trip also included a stop to visit and perform for U.S. troops in Poland — that he almost had a breakdown.
“I couldn’t even process. Because it is a staggering reality,” he said. “They’re not sulking, they’re not feeling sorry for themselves, they don’t want us to fight it for them, necessarily, but they would love anything we could offer to help them fight.”
Paisley tried his best to capture his feelings in an Instagram post as he was heading home, though he had to turn off the comments on multiple posts about the trip. The initial reaction to the posts were “100 percent positive,” his social media manager told him, and attributed a sharp pivot to the negative to foreign bots.
“Every now and then, there’s a real post from an American being influenced by the bots, and it’s like — that’s what I wish we could somehow deal with . ... Don’t let somebody from another country tell you what to think about yours,” Paisley said.
The fact that Paisley is taking any sort of political stance is unusual for country music in general, where artists are generally told to stay quiet to avoid alienating any fans. But Paisleysaid he was inspired by the bipartisan nature of the trip. He said he’s friends with elected officials that he vehemently disagrees with on various issues but constantly seeks to find common ground where they can connect. He’s not sure he even agrees that “Same Here” is political.
“There is a world leader” on the song, he acknowledges. “But otherwise, to me, it’s the least political song I could do. It’s about who we are as people.”