CMA Entertainer of the Year Brad Paisley is releasing his new album this Monday! May 23rd marks the release of Brad’s 15-song This Is Country Music collection — an album that Brad says he wanted to keep true to the sentiment of the title. Brad had a hand in writing a dozen of the album’s songs, so he was very much focused on the title-track lyrics, and if a song didn’t lyrically and musically say to Brad, “this is country music” or “this is real, this is your life in a song,” it wasn’t going to pass muster for what Brad believes is one of his best albums yet. (AUDIO INFO BELOW)

• The album hasn’t even hit stores, and already it’s launched two big hits with the title track, “This Is Country Music,” and the current blockbuster, “Old Alabama” featuring supergroup Alabama.
• The album is drawing great attention from the media…the June issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (out now, with album special guest Sheryl Crow on the cover), plugs This Is Country Music among their “5 Things We’re Loving This Month,” cheering, “How can you not love a guy who convinced Clint Eastwood to whistle on an instrumental track?” Entertainment Weekly gave the album an “A,” declaring that “The whole record plays like a best-of sampler — not just for Paisley, but for the history of the art form.” WOW!
• Brad’s new album features an array of special guests, including Carrie Underwood (who duets on the recapturing-love tale of “Remind Me”). Don Henley is on board for the song “Love Her Like She’s Leavin’,” while Blake Shelton — who joins Brad on tour in a few weeks — is in on the fun of the song “Don’t Drink the Water.” We mentioned Sheryl Crow earlier, and she teams with Marty Stuart and Carl Jackson on a Brad tradition — including a gospel song on his albums — with the song “Life’s Railway to Heaven.” And also as we said before, Clint Eastwood is among the incredible guests, lending his talents to an awesomely-cool Western instrumental that Brad wrote with Clint in mind, called “Eastwood.”
• As part of the media excitement surrounding the album’s release, be watching for Brad all over the small screen, with May 24th TV appearances on ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS’ Late Show with David Letterman, and FOX News Channel’s Hannity. The following morning, look for Brad on ABC’s The View. And on his visits to GMA, Letterman, and The View, he’ll be joined by Alabama!
• If you get RFD-TV, be sure to tune-in as Brad guests on The Marty Stuart Show, in the episode premiering this Saturday at 8pm, ET!
• Amid other media coverage, be looking for Brad on the cover of the May 30th issue of Country Weekly. The issue includes a pullout poster, as well as a feature on Brad that offers a peek into his family life and some of the fun he’s having with his boys Huck, now four, and two-year-old Jasper. Evidently, they love riding around their property with Dad. And while Jasper may have to settle for Brad’s driving, Huck is old enough that he gets to do a bit of safe ATV driving from his car seat — under Dad’s watchful care, of course. Brad tells Country Weekly, “He sits in the car seat in the driver’s seat and can steer and I run the gas and brake, sitting right there. It’s thrilling ’cause he’s actually driving a vehicle. I’m able to stop it, of course, with my foot, but he gets to drive. He sits there in that seat and it’s hilarious.” Check out the full feature in the new issue of Country Weekly.

  Brad Paisley is thrilled to be releasing his new album. (:29)
“I can’t wait for this album to be out and people to finally hear the work that we’ve done. And I think we’ve put together one of our strongest compilations of material. And it’s really what I wanted to do right now. It’s really a very country album. It’s very much filled with stories and real life, and it’s really borrowed from the first song, which, the line is, ‘This is real, this is your life in a song,’ and I think whoever you are, somethin’ on here is exactly that.”

  Brad Paisley took this album as a big challenge. (:20)
“You know, when I went in and cut this album, I really did think to myself, ‘How can we make something that represents what I think is country music, in all the different styles and all of the things that we talk about and all of the instrumentation and just whatever it is that if it’s called ‘country music,’ that’s what I wanted to do on this record — and that’s a big umbrella.”

  Brad Paisley put a lot of creative thought into how he made his new album, This Is Country Music. (:59)
“It seems like when we go in to record, I’ll think about both what we have covered in the past on other records and what we’ve either already written or are in the process of writing for the current album we’re recording. And I like to look for areas that I either haven’t explored fully or at least what’s going on around me that I feel like needs to be talked about — and that really dictates what we do. This album had the additional sort of thought process to it of ‘Okay, what is a big part of country music, or the country music that I grew up with and what I would consider, you know, fitting that description that we either haven’t done yet stylistically on this album or needs represented?’ Thought-process-wise, that’s sort of how I think, which is ‘What do I want to say, what would be fun to say, and what do I think will constitute something someone will relate to?'” 

  Brad Paisley had a thesis for his new album. (1:07)
“This collection of music was my attempt to say, ‘Hey, here’s your life in a song,’ whether that be right now or at some point in the future or in the past. Hopefully, every song on this record relates to someone out there. You know, there’s songs like ‘A Man Don’t Have to Die,’ which deals with a really heartbreaking case of a guy who has thrown his life away. You know? His family has deteriorated. He’s sitting in church, and he’s basically sayin’, ‘Don’t preach to me about going to Hell, because, you know, I’m sort of living that. I want to know about the rewards. Tell us about angels.’ And whether or not you’ve ever been in that situation, you have seen it. I mean, we’ve all seen it. We’ve seen people throw their lives away. And it’s our job in country music to sing their songs. I think that’s why country music does really well is because people don’t always have to personally have the same story as the song they’re listening to. It’s almost enough to just have experienced it vicariously.”