Paisley considers "Then" and now on new album

By Deborah Evans Price

NASHVILLE (Billboard) - In a scene that evokes visions of a backwoods Brill Building, several of Nashville's top songwriters have retreated to a rural outpost to write what they hope will be country radio hits. Their ringleader is Brad Paisley, who, with his co-writers, worked on songs for his new album, "American Saturday Night," in the guest house on his farm outside Nashville.

Paisley has horses, cows and a couple of ponds on the property, where Grand Ole Opry star and Paisley's friend Little Jimmy Dickens comes over to fish. "It's a great place to get away," Paisley says. "You're nowhere near Music Row. We called it 'the dream factory' there for a while."

Paisley has long been Nashville's sweetheart because of his ability to write both party songs and ballads perfect for radio. But thanks to the bucolic boot camp he and his songwriter friends went through, "American Saturday Night," which will be released June 30 by Arista Nashville, is more reflective than anything he's done before.

Paisley is involved in every aspect of his career, from touring to publishing. He designed his last five album covers and creates the animation used on video screens at his concerts. Anyone who's tempted to dismiss him as a one-trick pony specializing in such frat-boy anthems as his 2005 hit "Alcohol" or tongue-in-cheek social observations like "Celebrity" would be underestimating the intellect behind the wit.

Paisley is known in Nashville as a triple threat: a respected singer, songwriter and guitarist. But writing holds a special place in his heart.

AMERICAN TUNE

He puts a sense of fun and creative adventure into the new album's title track, "basically a party song," Paisley says as he sinks into a sofa at Blackbird Studios, a state-of-the-art facility owned by Martina McBride and her husband, John. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt, Paisley isn't wearing his signature white cowboy hat, and he boasts a thick head of dark hair that could make his follicle-challenged peers green with envy.

Despite the fact that he and his wife, actress Kimberly Williams, have a 2-year-old son (William Huckleberry, aka Huck) and a new baby (Jasper Warren, born April 17), Paisley doesn't look like a sleep-deprived parent. He's eager to talk about his new work.

"'American Saturday Night' is a song about what happens on a weekend in our country, under the guise of this melting pot and how really nothing is original here," he says. "We are all of some (foreign) heritage, other than those who are Native American, and it seems like it's all sort of washed up here on these shores as a best-of collection of what the world has to offer."

Since debuting in 1999, the West Virginia native has recorded seven albums -- five studio CDs plus 2006's "Christmas" and last fall's "Play," a mostly instrumental collection. His first two albums each sold more than 1 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and his career started to escalate with "Mud on the Tires" and "Time Well Wasted," which sold 2.4 million and 2.3 million, respectively.

Paisley's success on country radio is equally impressive. His second single, "He Didn't Have to Be," hit the top of the Hot Country Songs chart. Paisley has placed 20 singles in the chart's top 10, with 13 climbing to No. 1, including "We Danced," "I'm Gonna Miss Her (The Fishin' Song)," "Mud on the Tires," "When I Get Where I'm Going," "Ticks" and "Letter to Me," which spent four weeks at the top.

The new album's first single, "Then," has made Paisley one of only five acts in the 65-year history of the Hot Country Songs chart to collect 10 consecutive No. 1s.

Accolades have followed his sales: Paisley has won three Grammy Awards and multiple honors from the Country Music Assn. and the Academy of Country Music.

Often when a singer-songwriter becomes successful, writing is the first casualty of his busy schedule. That's not the case with Paisley.

"It's maybe easier in a sense," he says, crediting his collaborators with stoking the creative sparks. "I rely on these guys that I trust, like Chris (DuBois), Frank (Rogers) and Tim Owens, Kelley Lovelace, Ashley Gorley and Bill Anderson -- all these guys that throughout the years have become family. It's truly just a team now. Certainly I would be steering the ship at this point, but it's a lot of us working hard toward the end product -- I probably came up with a third of the ideas for the songs on this album, maybe more, and these guys brought in their own."