Washed Up on Shore

Brad Paisley - Water (mp3)(buy)

First let's agree on two things:

1.  Country music is by its nature regressive music.  It resists change:  It treasures tradition and authenticity both musically and socially to such an extent that modifications are often only adopted in the wake of long-established outside successes and under preapproved market conditions.  Its revolutions are rarely more than a cycling between a few ratified forms and a few chosen stories.  Country goes pop, country goes back to its roots, etc.  At its most extreme it gets primal and raw-sounding, not futuristic and fusion-happy... and as sure as Cash married into the Carter family it always comes running back home.

This is not a bad thing!  Especially as the rest of the musical landscape fractures into a billion rudderless ventures, it's impressive -- and yes, comforting -- to have an institution where the center holds.

2.  Brad Paisley (myspace) seems like the nicest guy in the world.  I do not know him and do not know much about him and American Saturday Night (streaming in full here), is the first album of his I have heard all the way through.  He might have the weirdest courtship story I've heard in a while.  But from his songs it sounds like he gives people the fairest of shakes, even when he's putting them down.  "Online," from a few years back, seems at first like an Aaron Sorkin-level bully session, its star-studded video acts like an ego trip; but its sympathies quickly become apparent and there's a generous (to its subject and to the audience) bash at the end.  Paisley is the guy who can mock you to your face and you still like him.  He gets to have things all ways because he's got a goofy sense of humor, a square sense of what's right, a good deal of writing and plucking talent.

He might be the perfect Obama-era musician.

There is material on this record that simultaneously seems radically progressive for the genre and slightly backward.  The title track is what you might think it is -- a patriotic party anthem -- and absolutely what you wouldn't expect.  "American Saturday Night" applauds immigration, re-embraces the concept of the melting pot ("fire up the blender, mix it on up").  It stars a girl who listens to British Invasion songs in her foreign car.  And she does not wind up in a fiery crash!

One of the problems with the song is that its notion of the multiculture is so rooted in product that it sounds like Paisley is celebrating a particularly effective import company.  It's not what he means, I know; enough of the products he cites are food items (Italian ice, Canadian bacon, etc) meant to mingle in our collective body.  There are direct shout outs to Little Italy and Chinatown.  But as he sings, "When my great great great granddaddy stepped off that ship, I bet he'd never ever dream we'd have all this," it's fairly easy to confuse integration with ownership.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the song's international wonders are Euro-centric.  He does dip South for Brazilian boots, Corona, margaritas; and again, there's Chinatown.  But there ain't a falafel stand or a decent curry in sight and I wonder if that's on purpose.  It's clever, if not totally honest, to couch his agenda in the comforts of consumerism and already assimilated entertainments and to hope the audience makes the logical leap.  This is country music and things have to be presented in terms of tradition.

Even if that goes back to the Cold War:  The Beatles tune our girl's cranking is "Back in the U.S.S.R."

"Welcome to the Future," the new single, starts out as another unironic celebration of stuff:  TV screens in the back of the SUV and Pac-Man apps for your iPhone warrant a "Glory Glory Hallelujah."  But when he subverts nostalgia to contemplate the give and take between Gen-Y technology and Greatest Gen sentiment, contrasting the letters his grandfather wrote home from the Pacific campaign with the video chat he just finished with a company in Tokyo, he seems genuinely in awe of the present.  (And because this is country music, the present is "the future."  And because this is country music, the song's synthesizers sound hilariously old-fashioned.  Like Brad Paisley's going to become an 8-bit artist or something.)

Considering the alternatives -- the paranoid wail of displaced values or the cynical sneer of entitlement -- Paisley's expressions of wonder are winning and centrist.  He's not an idealist, he's a realist.  "Wherever we were going, well, we're here."

"Future's" last third is about civil rights and like the rest of this it's awkward and interesting.  The singer starts with specifics, mentioning a friend in school, a star running back, who woke up with a burning cross on his lawn after he asked the homecoming queen out.  Rosa Parks gets rattled off by description.  Then things get kind of vague and self-congratulatory.  "Wake up Martin Luther, welcome to the future," is a ridiculous line (depending on how strong your faith is in cryostasis).  Paisley doesn't mention any specific signs of current progress and takes no real relevant stands.  (It's hard to imagine a successful country song endorsing gay marriage, unless it's an insulting parody of country music - and maybe country music deserves that.)  Obama would be the obvious symbol, but the singer has to know that much of his target demo is at best a very reddish purple.  (I was in a drugstore yesterday and overheard someone say, "You have to watch Glen Beck to know what's really going on."  We didn't vote the loonies away.)  Maybe he's just too smart to tie notions of progress to any single individual.

If the last part of the song ever feels self-congratulatory or over-optimistic, it's important that throughout Paisley's never doubtful about the benefits of progress.

A pair of songs about gender relations present a sticky wicket.  "She's Her Own Woman" is a devotional love song sung from the perspective of a fish's bicycle.  It's just the sort of song a man might think feminists would love:  Dripping with mock-humility, Paisley praises his wife's independence while complimenting her on "everything she does for me."  Housekeeping and cooking skills are cited.  He certainly doesn't help matters by answering the title with "...but she's mine."  Ownership again!  "The Pants" dresses down a man who refuses to respect women.  It's funny!  There's an obvious joke that -- I'll claim that Paisley uses some well-chosen details to misdirect -- had Dr. Pepper dripping from my schnozz.  I'm not sure the line "It's not who wears the pants, it's who wears the skirt" or the notion that a woman's power stems from her ability to withhold sex is exactly the sort of respect women crave.  But it's entirely possible that women will have a hard time getting angry at Brad Paisley.  I do!  He seems so nice!

There's even a song that answers some of the whining ninnies panicking over health care!  "No" (that's the title) might be obviously regressive, but it's as necessary a behavioral course correction as Kelly Clarkson's "I Don't Hook Up" (without being as shrill and dull as that track).  Song has Paisley praying for the wrong things -- including to overextend his grandfather's life! -- and learning that, "Every prayer you pray gets answered... though sometimes the answer... is 'No.'"

How about that?  Go to your room.

So why, after all those progressive-asterisk songs, did I lead off with the one that features a wet t-shirt contest?  Because it's summer, and "Water" is a winner.  I really like the line about "driving until the map turns blue," love the idea of a "love affair with water" -- though Paisley (inadvertently?) approaches narcissism.  He's mostly water, himself.

For all the perceived push on the album, floating's what Paisley does best.  Moving by standing still.  "Water" goes from childhood flashback to sweaty sex but never seems less than innocuous and appreciative.

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Scott Lucas and the Married Men, "What Fools Allow."

Oh gosh this song makes me want to slow dance with strangers.

Quickly, things I do not like:  The titular line is a thud, especially at the end; the guitar solo could stray from the melody a little more; I really wish that distracting Neil Young quote wasn't there.

Things I do like:  Everything else.  I was worried about the accordion and the fiddle -- What, no melodica and glockenspiel?  Fucking indie rock has made me cynical towards certain instruments. -- but the arrangement is lovely.  Simple.  Simple wins.

This is a newish band (myspace) and I love that they are decked out.  And I love the crowd chatter.  Because we don't see anyone else in the audience, and because it sounds like the whole thing goes unnoticed by everyone we hear offscreen, this performance feels very private.  Shhhh!  Don't tell anyone.  This is yours.

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" If you're looking for discursive discussion on the probability of Jones' true identity as a dominatrix from the West Indian section of Alpha Centauri, circa 2865, then you've come to the right place."

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"What's not to get? Cowboys built the pyramids out of Indians. Then the Indians blasted off into outer space. Except for the last little Indian who went back into his pyramid where he receives telepathic messages from his comrades in space. He is tormented by the images and sends a message that everything is terrible. The only part I don't get is a 1:08 when the horse is desperately trying to tell us something. For seven seconds he is mouthing his message, but my horse lip reading skills are so rusty I can't tell what he is saying."

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"Eugene took a running leap off the edge, grabbed him by the collar and dragged him onstage. The guy looked both terrified and ecstatic. Eugene pushed him around the stage a bit, yelling what I presumed to be Ukrainian expletives and then ceremoniously pushed him back off the stage. The audience cheered. Eugene lifted one of the speakers over his head as if he were contemplating heaving it into the crowd. (He probably was.)"

Both surprised and pleased that people are still discovering this band for the first time.  May they never ever stop.

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Man, if more music bloggers threatened to stop blogging until people bought more records, then I would not buy more records more often.

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"Team Band are a band that formed after seeing us play in Chicago. I was demanding that people form a band and so they did. I think they are brilliant."

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Consort. (Homme+Grohl+fn John Paul Jones)

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(pic via)

"I don't want to be rich to the extent that all I care about is keeping my job. I don't care enough about keeping my job right now. That's good. That makes me effective at what I do. I don't want to be frightened of getting fired. So, to that end, I suppose my ambitions are that I spend less than I earn. Look, the truth is we are all in a precarious business... I don't want to be frightened. As writers, to be frightened, you will become ineffective. So I don't want to have the ambition of a timeslot or a number of dollars frighten me. Do I want to make a lot of money? F--k yeah! But I've met a lot of rich people who are d-bags. I don't want to be that -- or any more of that than is necessary."

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"Google also thinks we've gotten over the triangle shirtwaist factory fire, the Hindenburg, and the sinking of the Titanic."

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tags: brad paisley  

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