Brad Paisley talks about the songs on his brand new album LOVE AND WAR

  Track 01 – “Heaven South”

“By starting this record with ‘Heaven South,’ we start the album by looking at the bright side of life. If you think about it, this is a great time to be alive in many ways. In that sense, it’s really a look at what it’s like to live in 2017, to sort of realize that a lot of the things . . . the distractions of life that aren’t necessarily ideal . . . are our own doing. When you think about it, there’s a long in the song that is a key line that really does set up some of what happens later on in the record and that is ‘If you turn on the news, you think the world ain’t got a prayer.’ I think that’s sort of true right now. There’s an escape that people are looking for. But sometimes the escape is truly just to look around and stock of the things that you really are thankful for. ‘Heaven South’ looks at the bright side of what it’s like if you are at all someone like me, where you love the simple things and you have a family that you love and you’re wondering what this is all about. Well, it’s about that. It’s about those people. It’s about finding the joy in being alive in America in 2017, wherever you may live…if you’re in Europe, it’s realizing that life is precious and this is truly heaven south. This is the kind of thing where if we want it to be . . . in some ways it feels like a John Lennon sentiment. If we want it to be, this is very heavenly . . . this existence. What’s interesting is from there, the reason starting the record with this is so important. From there, you’re then . . . things start to become less and less ideal as you go through life. You’ll see some of the dark side of things. But you never lose track of the perspective I think that that first track gives you, which is looking at the bright side. You’ll see as we go through this record, you come back around to asking once life sorta happens on this album. Asking what’s it all about again. We answer that again later.”

  Track 02 – “Last Time For Everything”

“The way is we have a publishing company called SeaGale Music which has a lot of different writers. Myself, Chris Dubois, Brent Anderson . . . write together a lot. The other writers on this, Smith and Mike . . . These guys that write with us from time to time. I’ve never written with them prior to this. Those guys were a part of . . . we all bounce around. We like to see other people as writers, but we write within our little groups a lot. When I was looking for the right thing to say on this record, I wanted something that was nostalgic that didn’t feel like something you had already heard said. I sort of let everyone know that. I’m looking for that thing that feels like those songs that you love that sort of deal with ‘those were the days’ or something like that. Chris and Brent came to me and said ‘Hey, we started a song with’ . . . we were all sitting around . . . Mike and Smith and these guys and ‘it’s called ‘Last Time for Everything’.’ We talked about what that could mean and we were talking about…The original way we were gonna write it was about picking a fight with a guy that’s six foot four and it’s like ‘yeah I’m not gonna do that again.’ Then, I kinda said I think that the real heart of this song is seeing Glenn Frey and that was an idea they had was the idea of that. I saw that. I saw The Eagles at the Forum the last run that they ever did at the Forum in LA, which is an amazing venue that they are known for. That’s where the ‘Hotel California’ live video comes from. I got to see the last performance of that group as what they were with Glenn and Don at the center and that’s to me the heart of this. The things that are never gonna happen again. Sometimes you realize in the moment and sometimes you don’t. You realize it at high school graduation. It’s one of those moments in life, one of the first times. You’re standing there in that cap and gown and you’re looking at these people that you’ve been on this journey with and you’re hugging and you realize ‘Oh!’ and you say and you write it in the yearbook ‘we’ll always be friends’ . . . ‘friends forever’ . . . whatever. Yeah, but no. You also realize as they’re driving away one of them is going to UCLA and another one is going to USC and another one to Oregon and somebody else is going to West Virginia. It’s like ‘Oh, yeah we may not keep in touch like we thought‘. You miss that but life keeps going.”

  Track 03 – “One Beer Can”

“When we wrote ‘One Beer Can’, we laughed all the way through the writing process. We talked about these things that we did in high school and the things that we did in college and there is this period in time in your life when you’re sixteen to even twenty-one, anywhere in there, where you’re still. . . You got one foot in your parents’ house and another foot on the front door, leaving. You’re just trying to get . . . You’re trying to become your own person. There’s also this . . . I don’t care how good a kid you are . . . There’s this aspect of your psyche at that point that’s like ‘What can I get away with?’ . . . ‘How far can I push this?’ The best depiction of this song that I have . . . the song ‘One Beer Can’ . . . which is about a house party that gets outta control for a high school kid. The best illustration, a friend of mine named Chad, who’s a friend of mine lives down in Houston. He has a couple of teenagers and when he heard the song, the first time it got to the chorus I thought he was gonna fall on the floor laughing. I said ‘What is it?’ He said ‘Well, we went out of town’ he and his wife. He came home and asked his son what happened? ‘Nothing’. Then he went and they have security cameras and they went to check the security cameras and they’d been unplugged. It’s sorta like the sky is the limit. Whatever happened in that house, even if it was Risky Business, whatever happened in that house pales in comparison to what’s going on in Chad’s head . . . what he’s thinking happened in that house. He’d been better off leaving those security cameras plugged in because his imagina . . . I guarantee his father’s imagination is worse than whatever really happened.”

  Track 04 – “Go To Bed Early”

“The idea came from Hannah Dasher, who is one of the co-writers on this. She had brought this to a writing session she was having with Chris DuBois and Brent Anderson.  They came to me and said ‘We started this song that I think you’d love’ and we started talking about it and we were like ‘Okay,’ that’s such a great hook also that I can’t believe someone hasn’t written. If they have, I don’t know if they did it the way we would do it.  The idea of this song . . . I love the fact that my little kids don’t understand it all, they don’t get it. They’re just like ‘Why? Why do you wanna go to bed early?’ That’s what I  . . . It feels like any great ol’, whether it’s a Cary Grant movie or something where the door shuts. (Laughs) You know what I mean? That idea of . . . it’s just so, such a veiled song in that sense in a great way. I like that. It feels like the way Conway Twitty would do a sexy love song. Although he might just come right out and say ‘I’d love to lay you down’. Yea I mean, it has a feel of those 80’s, what Bill Anderson would call ‘skin songs.’ It’s got those ‘Oh, your soft and supple skin’ that he used to do. It’s got some of that, without saying that.”

  Track 05 – “Drive Of Shame” (featuring Mick Jagger)

“While he (Mick Jagger) was here, we started writing and we sat right here and we just goofed around and talk about what would be a cool thing to write about. I had a title called ‘Drive of Shame’ which was about a one night stand in Vegas. In Mick’s verse he was like . . . and for me that would be Rodeo Dr. And I was like, ‘Awesome. Sounds good. Let’s do that.’ We talked about the aspects of that bad decision. One of the most fun things about writing this was we were talking about  . . . And that’s actually at the beginning of the song, you  hear us talking and that’s actually the actual writing session. He says ‘I wasn’t thinking too clear, I was thinking of beer and Obsession’s CK.’ That’s actually us conversing, trying to figure out what cologne sings well. We were talking about Ron Burgundy’s Panther from Anchorman, panther cologne. Probably wouldn’t be good. Whatever it was Obsession’s CK sang very well. I love hearing him say that. It’s really fun to sit down with a guy like that, who is responsible for modern music in every way shape and form. There’s a handful of people where you can say ‘Well, if you listen to modern music, everyone is influenced by these guys.’ You can say that about people like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones. Everybody is influenced by them. If you don’t like them, you’re still influenced by them. You’d be hard-pressed to find many people that don’t like them.”

  Track 06 – “Contact High”

“Well this one . . . took many different shapes. This song was nuts. It was like, to write it, it was just…crazy. It was like . . . the first way we wrote it didn’t work. The second way we wrote it was better but it wasn’t exactly it. We kept trying to make this thing a fun up tempo song. It kept feeling like it was just too . . . too clever for its own good. It wasn’t until it was sorta like that . . . (sings) ‘I had no idea. You would be.’ That idea of sort of that really awesome bluesy either 50’s or torch…what I call torch ballad feel. That’s what hooked it because I realized late in the game that this song needed to be sexy and needed to be funny. Great clever lines in it that are funny but the idea is you’re comparing what happens to you when she’s around to sort of a high. Second hand smoke type situation. Anyway, I just love how it came out. We have this big extended guitar outro that feels as if . . .  like I kept . . . every time we would fade it I would think ‘Oh, I wish they could hear a little more of it.’ Finally, we just left it. We didn’t fade it. It doesn’t fade, you just hear me go (makes noise) and end it the way the take ended when I was playing the solo. Cool. Yeah, didn’t have to end.”

  Track 07 – “Love and War” (featuring John Fogerty)

“In John’s (Fogerty) case, he is the voice of a generation that was embroiled in a conflict in Vietnam and there is no one that comes to mind quicker than John Fogerty and Creedence when you talk about the music of Vietnam era. I heard some comedian joke that it’s like you gave out awards like best soundtrack would be Vietnam War. It’s like that war wins best soundtrack and it’s true. There was a generation of people asking a lot of questions and John was leading that. And so now we are in another generation where we are looking at things thinking what in the world is going on. Especially, there is one thing I think we can all agree on, which is rare, but that’s that veterans are not being taken care of and they deserve way more than what they are getting from us. And I had this title ‘Love and War’ that really had to do with that. Which the idea was these guys not only is it unfair what’s happening to them after they get back but really it’s criminal what we are doing or not doing for these people. So I threw that title to John and said this is sort of what I brought you to town for. I need you to represent your generation in this song. I’m going to sing about mine in the first verse but you need to represent the Vietnam era and he was so fantastic. You know he’s a veteran he is someone who was drafted. He is a truly remarkable human being when it comes to where his heart is so we sat down and we started this song and the next thing you know we’d come up with these lines together. I’m so proud of that and then the band came in and I stood in that booth with him while he sang, we sang sort of together for a while. Just hearing him hit those high notes with that Fogerty rasp that thing he does, that send you off to die for us. When he hit those high notes it was like ah. I just felt like I was in Good Morning Vietnam the movie watching that soundtrack being made. He’s a truly remarkable voice of an entire era.”

  Track 08 – “Today”

“I think the magic of the ‘Today’ video and song was… the video was exactly the same magic as the song and that’s what somehow I’ve figured out when we were putting together what this needed to be. And that’s that it needs to be other people’s story. You know I have my own thing that I wrote that about, obviously, but my moment…my ‘Today’ that I am singing about is not going to be the same as yours. That is something that I realized early on and I wanted this song to immediately feel like it could apply to someone else’s life and the video help connect the dots in a big way. I think if you heard the song the first time and it may not be a natural sort of leap to think ‘oh soldier coming home’ but when you see the video and you see a soldier walk into a classroom and surprise his daughter that he is back from Afghanistan, you realize nothing connects the dot like that. Of course, that would be the greatest moment of both of their lives. I mean that beats probably her birth in some ways. I would think. The same thing goes for proposals and weddings, those are obvious leaps but you see dad gets up out of a wheelchair and walks his daughter down the aisle. I love the way the video just… game winning shot for girls’ basketball championship game. That’s an important moment that a lot of those kids will look back on and see as a highlight of their life. I learned something I think about this album with that very first single and it’s that this album exists for other people. It exists to tell other people stories and that is something that I want to do with each of these songs as we create videos as we connect dots whether that’s ‘Love and War’ which comes right before this ironically, which is meant to honor veterans and then the ‘Today’ video does that sort of picks that ball up and keeps rolling. I want to do that throughout these. I want to find a way to make sure somebody sees ‘Heaven South’ as their story. That they look around their life. In that song I am looking around my life and I’m realizing that everything from beer battered chicken to watching a paper-per-view UFC fight, is fantastic. It’s just great to be alive. When you’re having any of those situations. I want them to sort of see their own life and realize that so finding the common thread throughout this album I realized that ironically the first single we accidentally figured out ‘oh that’s the common thread ‘Today’ is the thread. And there is no mistake that in the sequence of this record, ‘Today’ is exactly the half-way point. You are half way through this record when you hear that song and that’s the perfect sentiment in that moment. Because there is a key line in ‘Today’ and that’s ‘I know it won’t always be like this…it’s not over yet and I already miss today’ and so that is true. You are going to go through the rest of the record and see some ways where that is not ideal.”

  Track 09 – “Selfie#theinternetisforever”

“We are living in a day and age where we are living in our phones, a lot. One of the things at the beginning of the record that it says is ‘If you turn it off and look around, it’s just another day in heaven south’ well in the middle of the record it’s like you’ve had a highlight with ‘Today’ here’s a low point, but let’s laugh at it. Because it is not a life or death low point, a bad selfie is a bad selfie. We have all done it. Some worse than others. What’s funny is on the record you go right out of ‘Today’ which is here’s this is going to kill you, it’s all of these peoples greatest moments of their life. Look at this, this is when this bride-to-be her father surprised her. This happened, this proposal, this child was born…all these amazing things. Look at this on tape and all of these are real. These are real videos that people took or either submitted or I found that are in this video. Right into, and so are these, but they are bad decisions, but let’s laugh at that and let’s celebrate the fact that we are all idiots. And nobody does that better, than me and my fans. We can take bad videos, we should have a license to have a cell phone and take these photos but unfortunately anyone can do it. So I’m hoping that we end up with a lot of submissions here that make for wonderful viewing and let’s laugh together. I’m going to go ahead and have a few in there myself that I am not proud of.”

  Track 10 – “Grey Goose Chase” featuring Timbaland

“We sat in this room and on ‘Grey Goose Chase’ it was an example of we had this…myself and Lee Miller had the title. I’ve always thought that felt like it ought to be really fast and it ought to be one of those blue grass picking songs. I said ‘what would you do with this if you had the groove?’ He goes in there and I had Kyndal playing the banjo Kenny playing a banjo base, who is my base player. So Tim (Timbaland) was in there beating…he had his hands and some brushes and he was beating on Kendal’s banjo while he played and then the base while he played and we mic’d it. And that stuff you hear in the beginning is all beats he made and then he took all of those smacks and hoots and hollers and things he was doing and turned it into this groove underneath of the record. It’s all real stuff but he then subdivided it up so none of that is really samples. It’s all sounds of things in this studio and it turned it into something that I have never heard before. It’s a jug band. The funniest thing is, I don’t know if you have ever heard of efing. They did that in heehaw all of the time where a jug band blows in a jug. Google it you will laugh. It’s not a flattering thing to watch but it’s funny. He got into that and he is laughing at us as hillbillies and going I can do that and so this is his version of efing.”

  Track 11 – “Gold All Over The Ground”

“This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever had the honor of getting to do. In keeping with the rest of this record, I am way out punting my coverage here. I mean, I’m writing with Mick Jagger, John Fogerty. I don’t have a lot of business sitting in the same room as these people, I realize that but I don’t . . . I’m just not smart enough to realize that and sort of not attempt it. Therefore, some good things happen when you’re getting that opportunity. Another one was handed to me and my friend John Carter Cash who is…He’s had a long time plan to take his father’s unfinished work and get it finished because there’s no reason the world can’t see what Johnny was working on that he never finished if it can be done in a respectful way. So, he shows up with a song that he thought I would be right to find a way to complete. He brings in this song titled ‘Gold All Over the Ground,’ which was sort of an unfinished lyric. It was a complete thought but it also wasn’t really structured like a song yet, totally. I approached it the same way I would approach any co-write. Basically tried to imagine if Johnny and I sat down and we tried to write and he had an idea called ‘Gold All Over the Ground’ and these were the things he wanted to say, How would I approach that? It really was something I can’t describe but it was so magical in terms of it felt like he was in the room. It should have been harder to do. It should have been something that was intimidating and completely felt foreign and awkward. Instead it was warm and it was the kind of thing that just seemed to want to exist. The next thing you knew, I was able to come up with this melody that just fit these words and John was there and like he said…’I felt like you really just channeled whatever needed channeling there.’ So the next thing you know, it exists and it was magic. It was really, really beautiful to hear this and I think John is working on entire project of these. When we finished this, it was just . . . he was very gracious and said ‘I think this is yours to take and put on your record.’ I think it fits this album in a great way in that sense and I look forward to seeing what else people come up with with whatever else John has to offer. For people to sort of let Johnny continue to make music in the only way possible this way.”

  Track 12 – “Dying To See Her” (featuring Bill Anderson)

“This is really another piece that feels like this album wanted this to exist in some way. There was divine intervention in some way as well because I had this title, ‘Dying to See Her,’ and I can’t believe that I’ve never heard that done before. I mean, why wasn’t that written in 1965? That’s been sitting there for all of us to write, as far as I know. Here we are with something unique and what’s cool is that when you look at the sequence of the record, it’s no mistake that this follows ‘Gold All Over the Ground’ because Johnny Cash wrote that song longing to be with June. That song was written before, written way back before they were married. So that song is written for June. You come out of that song, and I included an interview clip that says she was the reason he was still alive. And we fade into this song. When I called Bill Anderson up, I said ‘I’ve got this title. I don’t wanna tell you what it is over the phone but just whenever you can come down, come down.’ So he comes down the next day to write and I threw him the title and he just hung his head and said ‘That’s my dad.’ Bill’s dad . . . Bill’s mom passed away first and Bill’s dad was destroyed. Bill tells the story that he would go every day to the grave site. His dad would. So they finally realized, he was just standing there and they built him a stone bench and inscribed Anderson on it at the foot of the grave where he could go sit. Sort of the opposite of ‘Waitin’ on a Woman.’ And he, for a short amount of time there, would go sit on the bench and eventually his health failed and he’s buried there. What’s wild about it is that I had gotten the idea, watching my great uncle Johnny was awesome. He was the first real death in the family that I remember, other than a great grandmother or two that were in their 90’s and no one was shocked by that. Johnny wasn’t that old but Johnny’s wife died suddenly, and unexpectedly, and was healthy, seemingly healthy, and then she had a heart attack in the middle of the night. Johnny didn’t make it, I don’t know what it was, six months. We would go see him and he would just cry. He loved her so much. The next thing you know, we’re burying him. And I just realized that men don’t do well, that’s not the way it’s supposed to go. I think the guy is supposed to go first and when they don’t, you know, it’s like the clock is ticking at that point…often.”

  Track 13 – “Solar Power Girl” (featuring Timbaland)

“Yeah, I’ve known a lot of girls that have daddy issues. A lot of us guys aren’t good fathers in this world. We need more great fathers on earth. When we were writing . . . When Tim (Timbaland) and I were writing this, we were talking about . . . He’s not so interested in the lyrics as he is in capturing whatever the lyric says in terms of the groove and feeling. I really felt like a lot of this was something that was on my shoulders to come up with what the story was. When he came up with this groove, I started feeling like ‘Oh, this feels like a journey. And this feels to me, young. What’s this young journey I wanna sing about?’ I’ve got some people in mind that are this girl. I love the imagery in this song. The way that we wrote it where it feels like this girl . . . It’s a total look at the bright side. A life that’s not gone right. Not gone completely according to plan. But there is this moment in a person’s life where you get out from the shadow of your parents, no matter how good or bad that shadow was and you go to school or you go to college and you go off and get a job or you do whatever it is and you become your own person. This is a song about a girl becoming her own person. The idea of ‘Solar Powered Girl’ . . . I had that title and I though ‘What would that mean?’ Well that would mean this is a girl that needs sunlight. That would mean that her life wasn’t necessarily from one of those places where you get a lot of that. What’s the epitome of that? To me, that’s California. It’s the Gold Rush, if the gold was sunlight. She’s going to a place where she can feel the Earth’s closest star a little more. Whether she’s an actress or somebody moving to California for any other dream, that’s a place where a lot of people go to chase dreams. I remember listening to Praire Home Companion once, and Garrison Keillor talking about in Minnesota, you’re a realist. You realize winter is coming and it’s gonna get dark and bleak and cold. In California, you don’t have to be a realist because it’s just sunny.  Reality is not quite the same in a place like that. Yeah, you’ve got earthquakes and things like that but rarely. Anyway, it felt like such a great look at a girl finding her way and girl power in some sense. It’s kind of a modern super hero song.

  Track 14 – “The Devil Is Alive And Well”

“I feel like the news networks and the web services . . . are just hungry for . . . They don’t mean to be. They’re hungry for bad news because it is just better reading. It’s more interesting than good news any day. They sort of make a killing, no pun intended, on this. In that sense, it feeds on itself in our society and it’s tough because you want to see the bright side but you can’t avoid the dark side. This is the gospel song on the record to me. But it’s a gospel song for any denomination. You could believe in anything or you could not believe in anything and you would probably agree with the sentiment of this.  There are just somethings that are happening that shouldn’t be happening in the world. That’s always been that way…but we see it now. We didn’t always see it. But we see it, there are cameras everywhere now. There are reporters every because all of us are reporters now. In that sense, how do you sort through all that? I don’t know but I think that I don’t necessarily know the answers but one of the things I come to in this song is God is Love. I believe that and it’s the kind of thing that we all need to take a break and not necessarily ingest all the stuff they’re shoveling all the time.”

  Track 15 – “Meaning Again”

“Well, this was the last song written for the album. It’s because I felt the need for it.  Here’s the need. You start the record with ‘Heaven South,’ you look at the bright side. You go through all of these things from the positive of ‘Go to Bed Early’ to the negative of ‘Dying to See Her’ and the worst case scenario situations as far as love goes in that sense. Then you have the various things, the low points of ‘Selfie,’ the low point while having fun with it of ‘Drive of Shame’ and then you have the dark journey of a girl attempting to get away from a bad family situation with ‘Solar Powered Girl’ all the way through ‘The Devil is Alive and Well’ which is like this world is feeding us a lot of the negative that’s in our face all the time. You can be disenchanted by some of these things. So, what’s the answer? You come through this record. What is it . . . What is it all about? That’s the question you’re left with when you get to the end of this record. I didn’t wanna leave that unanswered. Not that I can answer it for everybody but I can answer it for me. It’s you walk through the door and there’s the people you love. You’re stuck on the interstate, you feel like you’re not making a difference, whatever it is you’re doing. You’re left with these questions. All of us in our jobs feel daily, at times, why am I doing this? Does anybody care? Or whatever it is. Well, somebody probably does. You walk through that door and there she is or there they are or whatever it is. It could be your dog. (Laughs) Whatever it might be but you find your meaning with the relationships in your life and your love. At the end of the day, which is really where this song takes place, that’s what matters.”

  Track 16 – “Heaven South (reprise)”

“So, you’ve gone through this album and you have this full circle journey back to ‘Heaven South’ and it’s no mistake that at the end of that, at the end of ‘Meaning Again,’ your life finds its meaning by realizing at the end of the day, this is what matters. We reprise ‘Heaven South’ and I grab the lines that I want people to take home and that is ‘Turn on the news, you think the world ain’t got a prayer. Turn off and look around, it’s just another day in heaven south.’  And that’s the point.”