Compared to other music industry hubs like Los Angeles and New York, Nashville is a small town. Even Austin feels more like a sprawling metropolis than our cozy Music City, where we’ve grown accustomed to small and midsize clubs with doormen and barkeeps who know us by name, or at least by sight. However, doing our crusty old Spin shuffle past Broadway’s blinking excess and Brad Paisley’s stable of semi trucks, we noticed an unusual twinge of homesickness beneath our amusement at the guy shouting fire-and-brimstone by the security barrier. But Paisley had promised us a spectacular show — the kind that’s only financially feasible and physically possible in an arena — so there was no way we were gonna pass this up.
After we passed on an 11-dollar tallboy, we noticed that our neighborhood friendly enormodome was filling up. Paisley’s homecoming was an easier sale for the hometown crowd than recent stops for Nine Inch Nails and recently confirmed Bonnaroo co-headliner/possible reluctant redemption-seeker Kanye West. Opener Danielle Bradbery and her band powered through their set with the astonishing speed of Lower Broad lifers, hitting our non-pop-country-attuned ears like a presentation at a label meeting: Here’s the single, here’s the album cut, here’s the song NBC licensed for Olympics coverage. Winning the fourth season of The Voice landed Bradbery a development deal with Universal, but such deals only last for so long, and there’s no better place to make a pitch than a stone’s throw from Music Row, where every power player is likely to be in attendance. Bradbery's material exemplified how the dominant feature of contemporary country music is the thematic content — sing about clubbing instead of hearth and home, and it’s straight-ahead pop. Challenging songs or no, Bradbery has impressive vocal abilities and no trouble commanding a crowd, so we’d lay odds that good business decisions and plain old luck will determine where she goes next.
During the break, Deejay Silver, the Guy Fieri of beats, served up a rapid-fire stream of lukewarm country dance remixes in hopes that we would “turn this place into the world’s biggest country club.” We’re more than happy to take a break from our steady diet of music that lights up the weird-shit-o-meter, but we’ve got to draw the line at “Truck Yeah.” Thanks for the tour of the club, but we’ll show ourselves out.
Under cover of darkness, Murfreesboro native Chris Young took the stage next, followed by 45 minutes of everything we like least about contemporary mainstream country. The crowd enjoyed his stockpile of twang-tastic drinkin’ songs, lovin’ songs, pick-up line songs and pickup truck songs, but not a one resonated with us. Not to play down Young’s skill or that of his band, who made a tightly choreographed show look effortless while playing their asses off, but we came away with the same feeling we get when we see a spray-tanned bro with a tribal tat: There’s a manufactured sense of rugged individuality for sale here, and it ain’t pretty. We’re not at all opposed to focusing on entertainment instead of an artistic statement, especially in an arena setting, but Young — really the folks guiding his image, since decisions are made by committee once you get to this level — have wrung the flavor right out of his music. It’s especially disappointing when promising songs like “I Hear Voices” come off sounding hokey.
Following another mercifully short DJ set, the lights went out, a thundering Pink Floydian heartbeat literally raised the hair on the back of our neck courtesy of the subwoofers, and the non-stop electric circus of Brad Paisley’s Beat This Winter set was off and rolling. Accompanied by a dazzling multimedia extravaganza that included video on every conceivable surface, animation floating in midair on a sheer scrim two stories tall, and focused lights that briefly turned his Stetson into the amazing Technicolor dream hat, Paisley led off with “Southern Comfort Zone,” a song about playing with boundaries and being open to the unfamiliar. As Paisley explained to Scene contributor Jewly Hight, however, the big show is about giving the fans a good time with the hits they want, a promise he reiterated in his opening salute before shooting straight down the middle with 20 more of his best-loved tunes.
Occasionally, the production got a little distracting — caught up in the video on the two-story LED wall, we failed to clock the 8-foot puppet careening around the catwalk until halfway through “Celebrity.” We’d already written a crack about how we got to see a hologram duet even though The Doggfather didn’t break out CyberPac earlier this week, but we had to scrap it when Carrie Underwood appeared in the flesh (rather than via hologram, as she typically does) to sing “Remind Me.” Paisley’s wicked Telecaster wailing didn’t hurt, either: An electric bluegrass breakdown segued into a Van Halen medley sounds painful on paper, but don’t knock it till you’ve heard it. Drawing on old-school writing and musicianship, Paisley and band would probably have won us over in a practice space, but even in this blizzard of light and sound, they made every groomed riff and precisely-placed lick feel like it grew there.
“Accidental Racist” wasn’t anywhere near the menu, and probably wouldn’t have been, with or without the controversy. Setting aside that boneheaded tune, both Paisley’s material and his interpretive skills served him well. During the sing-along encore of his smash-hit “Alcohol,” we realized that he’d even hit us right in the crotchety old heartstrings: “I got you in trouble in high school / But college, now that was a ball / You had some of the best times / You'll never remember with me” pretty well sums up our relationship with music. Pleasantly surprised to find something in common with a country A-lister, we moseyed on.
