It’s always interesting to see what an artist comes up with after you’ve discovered him. In each discography, I look at two touchstone albums — the one that marks my first exposure to the artist and the first one that I heard right along with everybody else.

American Saturday Night was my intro disc for Brad Paisley, and (as intro albums often do) it remains my favorite of his records. But once I’d spent the time and money to catch up on everything else he’d recorded, would his first new album live up to expectations?

I’ll admit, when I first heard the title of Paisley’s newest album, This is Country Music, and his intention to back off from the expansiveness of American Saturday Night, I was a bit worried. Would this album lean more toward the sort of country music I still find tiresome, rather than the clever, winning Brad Paisley music I love so much?

Of course not. This isn’t just country music, it’s country music as written and performed by Brad Paisley, and that’s a whole different story. This album is just as heartwarming, funny and musically tight as its predecessor. It continues a streak of wonderful records that should be the envy of artists in any genre.

Paisley’s nod toward the tropes that make country music what it is has him in heartbreak territory a lot on this album. If I didn’t know better, I’d be worried that his marriage is on the rocks. The break-up songs on This is Country Music are specifically about marriages that couldn’t stand the test of time.

‘Remind Me’ is another sort of song, a duet in which a husband and wife plead with each other to recapture the friskiness of their early relationship. Paisley shares vocals with Carrie Underwood, a daunting prospect considering those powerful pipes, and they generate a heat and tension that feels fresh. I can’t recall any songs about this specific topic… a married couple wanting to fool around the way they used to. The song is pretty chaste, but it’s still sexy.