Paisley considers "Then" and now on new album

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."

KEEPING NOTES

Paisley also relies on help from his iPhone. "Using an application that you can buy that's a voice recorder, I had about 30 things talked into it and I had another 30 things written into it in notes," he says. "I do a lot of things in the process of writing an album that I don't normally do. I'll go see more movies than I would normally see. I'll sit through the previews and have my iPhone out typing. That's the beauty of these things -- you can be typing in song ideas as somebody says something."

Paisley wrote most of "American Saturday Night" in Nashville. "The hard part about writing on the road is that we'll get in the middle of it and my road manager will walk in and say we need whatever or he'll say, 'Sound check in 30 minutes!,' and then in the back of your mind you think, 'Wow, we've only got 30 minutes,'" says Paisley, who cites Mike Reid, Dean Dillon and Steve Wariner among his songwriting influences. "The door shuts, and for the next 30 minutes you're just screwed because you're not going to be able to think. That's how it is out there."

Although Paisley has written most of his hits, he's open to the possibility of recording songs he didn't write. "Whiskey Lullaby," his chart-topping duet with Alison Krauss, was written by Jon Randall and Grand Ole Opry star Bill Anderson. "When I Get Where I'm Going," featuring Dolly Parton, was a No. 1 penned by George Teren and Rivers Rutherford.

Many in Nashville's songwriting and publishing community appreciate the fact that Paisley and producer Frank Rogers are open to outside material.

"There are certain artists that never cut any outside songs," says Rogers, a friend of Paisley's since their days at Nashville's Belmont University. "We have the best songs in the world in this town. Artists are crazy not to listen."

In looking for songs for the new album, however, Paisley and Rogers didn't find anything that trumped what he and his collaborators had written. "It just happened like that this time," Paisley says.

Commenting on the new songs, he notes that "there's definitely a thread on here of looking back some. If the last album was looking back to high school, this one I look back a lot on who I became from a little boy on. You'll see it in 'If He's Anything Like Me,' which is about my son Huck and also Jasper. ... Songs are certainly influenced by how I see the world now through a couple of other sets of eyes as well as my own." (Huck makes an appearance at the end of the song.)

'DIFFERENT TIMES'

"American Saturday Night" isn't devoid of the humor Paisley is known for. Overall, though, it's a mature effort from an artist with a wealth of life experience. "No one can make the album they made 10 years ago with a straight face," Paisley says. "There's two reasons: One is you change as a person. To be a true artist, I have to be true to who I am now and write that way. And the second thing is these are different times."

"Welcome to the Future" -- co-written by Paisley and DuBois -- is, Paisley says without hesitation, his favorite among all the songs he's ever written.

"We knew we wanted to talk about technology and how the world is changing," he says. "It's the hardest thing in the world to take the emotions I've had in the last six months and put them in a song, (including) having two boys now and thinking about them. That whole first verse just so resonates with the world I grew up in and the world they're going to grow up in. They're two different places. I was thinking back to the world my grandfather grew up in. In spite of some of the worst times economically that we've ever had, there's a feeling of hope and a feeling of pride."

Paisley hopes some of the new tunes will provide a little musical relief from the daily grind -- and he wants his tour to feel the same way. "I wanted to deal with the weekend scene in America, which is what people are living for these days," he says. "Those of us that still have jobs are living for Friday and Saturday. They are going to live it up."

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)