Up front

Brad Paisley keeps making hits and taking risks

By Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times  |  July 5, 2009

LOS ANGELES - In the decade since country singer Brad Paisley put out his debut album, the kid from Glen Dale, W.Va., has concocted a savvy musical amalgam of Roger Miller’s songwriting wit, Buck Owens’ hard-rocking twang, and Chet Atkins’ guitar wizardry. But there’s powerful evidence of another influence at work in Paisley’s music, one of the titans of American popular culture: Mark Twain.

Like Twain’s youthful literary hero Tom Sawyer, Paisley frequently couples wisdom with a finely honed sense of humor and appears to share Huck Finn’s disenchantment with the emphasis that all those grown-ups around him place on becoming “sivilized.’’

In hits such as “Online,’’ “Celebrity,’’ and “Ticks,’’ he’s proved to be a skillful sneak, slipping in the kind of clever ideas and wordplay that few of his peers at the top of the country sales charts dare to. He has tackled the subject of alcohol abuse from different vantage points in two hit songs, the whimsical “Alcohol’’ and the artistic punch to the gut “Whiskey Lullaby,’’ his award-winning duet with bluegrass queen Alison Krauss. Paisley’s eighth album, “American Saturday Night,’’ came out Tuesday (see review, right).

In person, Paisley’s as quick with a quip as you’d expect from his humor-laced songs and he has a gift for putting visitors quickly at ease with his long-lost-friend demeanor. He frequently exhibits an impressive attention to detail, whether it’s concerning some facet of the stage setup for his live shows, the production work on a new recording, or the musical equipment surrounding him.

“Welcome to the Future’’ opens with a spirited appreciation of the technological progress in the last half century before segueing into an expression of amazement and gratitude at other changes that have taken place. He charts a seismic shift that courses from witnessing the burning of a cross on the lawn of a black classmate years ago to the recent election of Barack Obama as president.

“There was an amazing shift in public emotion that night. It was breathtaking. I felt like in country music, we’re the first ones to write about some kind of conflict, or war, and yet we shy away from these other topics, like equal rights. . . . I had that idea, and Chris DuBois, the song’s co-writer, and I started mulling this around. I said I don’t want it to be a dark song in any way; I want it to be as hopeful as it can be. We need to make this point and make it well.’’

It’s a big gamble whether the country audience will embrace that kind of subject matter - a gamble Paisley’s label is courting by releasing the song shortly as his next single. It also will test whether he can extend his streak of 10 consecutive No. 1 singles, a modern record in pop music.

“We tend to be a Republican format,’’ said Joe Galante, chairman of Sony Music Nashville, the parent company of Paisley’s label, Arista Nashville. “He’s reaching out a little differently with this one, so it is a little riskier than normal.’’

“I wanted to get the emotion of it without being the least bit preachy,’’ Paisley said. “Republican or Democrat, on Nov. 4 you had to be moved. People stood there in disbelief at the turn our country had taken. There was a sense of pride, no matter who you were. I remember having discussions on my bus, in my household: Could he really win this? A lot of people were saying, ‘I don’t know if it’s time, if the country’s ready.’ And then all of a sudden, I guess we’re ready. Welcome to the future.

“It’s the proudest thing I’ve ever recorded,’’ he said.