Tag Archives: American Saturday Night

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Song of the Day #552: ‘Then’ – Brad Paisley

And now the third reason I totally dig Mr. Kimberly Williams: Brad Paisley is romantic.

And I mean very romantic. His albums are generally split between three kinds of songs… the funny songs, the heartbreak songs and the love songs. I wouldn’t say he’s any better at one group than the others — he’s great at them all — but he comes across as particularly sincere in the love songs.

I imagine that’s because he’s still in the extended honeymoon phase of his marriage, together seven years with two young children, and because Kimberly Williams — in addition to being extremely cute — seems like a very cool person. I shamefully admit to reading her Twitter feed in preparation for this blog entry.

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Song of the Day #540: ‘Welcome to the Future’ – Brad Paisley

Best Songs of 2009 – #1

Brad Paisley was my most welcome surprise of 2009. I lucked into purchasing his album after reading a discussion among music critics on Slate.com in which the first critic named his album American Saturday Night as her favorite of the year and effusively sang his praises.

This was the rare album that struck me as great the very first time I heard it… the album wasn’t even over before I knew it was rocketing up my own list. Many listens later, it settled into its perch at #1. I picked up another of Paisley’s celebrated discs, Time Well Wasted, a week later and I find it equally good.

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Brad Paisley – American Saturday Night

For the longest time I had a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything that even resembled country music… it was the antithesis of the sort of “cool” music I was proud to like.

But then things got complicated, as things tend to do.

First it was the country detours by some of my favorite artists — Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and Elvis Costello’s Almost Blue, for example. It was tempting to dismiss those albums as ill-advised experiments, but tickling the back of my brain was the complicating knowledge that ‘Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You’ and ‘A Good Year For the Roses’ are really good songs.

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