Album Review: American Saturday Night by Brad Paisley

An American Saturday Night is not an unusual topic for a country song, but Brad Paisley's celebration is. Paisley sees a typical weekend night as a cultural collision of French kisses, Italian Ices, Canadian bacon, and margaritas, a place where Mexican and Dutch beers chill side by side in a bucket of ice. If he leans too heavily on labels, referring to those beers by brand name, it's merely a reflection of Paisley's uncanny knack for capturing the casual contemporary details of American life at the tail-end of the 2000s.

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Paisley discs usually include instrumentals, comedy sketches, and gospel. Here, he drops that lovable detritus, going for? constant home runs. Don’t miss American Saturday Night‘s opening three-song stretch, and ”Welcome to the Future,” which evokes Obama in assessing these as the days of miracle and wonder. A? .

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Is “Welcome to the Future” the first song out of the Nashville machine to express awe at the election of the first African-American president? It’s the first to make an impression, and without even mentioning Obama or the election. The second single on American Saturday Night, it takes a subtler backdoor route to evoking the historic moment, in the process increasing the chance that the song itself will move you or give you chills the first time you listen. This is smart songwriting.

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A spirited challenge to the prejudices of both sides of country’s enduring schism. Andrew Mueller 2010 For the last 40 years, a civil war­ of sorts has raged within country music. In broad terms, the opposing forces are the country establishment of Nashville, fielding battalions of airbrushed divas and square-jawed crooners in hats, and the ragged underdogs defining themselves as alt-country and perceiving themselves ­– usually correctly, if occasionally self-righteously ­– as the true spiritual heirs of Hank Williams.

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BRAD PAISLEY“American Saturday Night”(Arista) It would be fun to borrow Brad Paisley for a bunch of afternoons. Each day you could give him an empty room and a pencil and feed him machine-generated random assignments based on mundane objects or sawed-off bits of sayings: to write a song called, say, “Chair,” or “A Little to the Left,” or “Receipt.” (He likes one-word titles.) In two weeks you might have an album like this one. Mr.

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