Interview: The Brad Paisley Heart-to-Heart About Post Malone, Metaphors, Going AWOL and the Sequel to a 20-Year-Old Truck Song

We get it. It was a song about truck. And 20 years later, it's a remake of a song about a truck. Or is it?

The way we see it, ‘Mud on the Tires’ was Paisley asking his girlfriend, "Come on now, what do you say? Girl, I can hardly wait to get a little mud on the tires." But now, that girl is back in town. And that old flame of his is asking, "It’s good to be back home, but you know what would make it better? You still got that short bed Chevy we put the memory miles on?"

Holler asked Brad Paisley if we were over-analyzing it, or if his new song, ‘Truck Still Works’, is fishing for answers by indirectly asking, "Does this love still work?"

"That era really launched everything for me. 'Mud on the Tires' really was about taking country lifestyle and celebrating it. I think that's a major part of what country music has become. This new song is one of the few where I'm not explicitly saying everything that the metaphor is saying. It's a big metaphor. The fun fact is that the truck in the picture for this new song - that's my Chevy truck. I still have it from the early 2000s. It's now the farm truck. It's been beat to hell, but it runs".

"The idea started with Will Bundy, Hunter Phelps and Rodney Clawson writing this idea. When I start writing a song, I don't want to step on anything anybody else has done. And usually I'm like, 'I've already done that.' But in this case, doing something new meant doing something old. They'd started the concept of the girl coming back into town, but they couldn't step on 'Mud on the Tires." But Chris Dubois and I said, 'Let's lean in. Let's make it literally what would happen next’. Sonically, it's reminiscent. But the trick is making sure there was enough new. The second verse has more of this different bass part, so it has this raw rock underbelly that evolves as the song goes on. There are new lines in the song and ones that are old, but they don't feel old because they're subtle. It's like it's got a new coat of paint".

"There's a lot of fun in throwing a memory in the middle of something new. Really that's life, isn't it? There's nothing more complicated than the nostalgia of it. The palette for this whole thing is a return to this familiar territory, sonically and thematically. One of the criticisms that you fight whenever you do something new is, ‘Is it just a retread?’ We've neutralized that with this because anything I might do on here that is reminiscent is intentional".

"He deserves to be welcomed in country music because of his love for it and his immersion into it. The amount of dedication and hours and blood, sweat and tears and liver damage that he has been here doing - he's been working really hard on becoming a country artist, legitimately. It's not some whim. Sometimes, over the years, we've all seen the forays into country music by people who are like, 'I'll try this for a minute'. That's not what he's doing. I get the feeling this was his goal all along. He's just that serious about it. It was really eye-opening to see his creative process. It's so different than mine. When we went to write with Post, it was already about 1:00 in the morning and we were starting a third song. Post will work all the time on music and he will not stop, and he will ask question after question about how you do this right. He has shown so much reverence for what I do that it's uncomfortable, but flattering”.

"The effect the new song had on my friends and family was unanimous. Nobody was like, "Don't do that". If you want criticism, my kids can do it. But I played the song for Jasper, and he got this look on his face - his eyes were getting big like he likes it. There's none of that smirk. He said, 'Dad! Are you kidding me? Are you telling me while I was at camp you wrote the sequel to "Mud on the Tires?" This is a banger. You need to call the tour the Trucks Still Works tour'. He was instantly in. It was great to hear my kid sounding like a fan for once".

"I've been kind of AWOL. Kind of hanging out here on the farm, content to not tour. I felt like people had seen me enough for a while, so I thought I'd just stay home. I thrived in the pandemic. But in the end, when you make some new music, you don't know if anybody's gonna want your new stuff. That's always the challenge. There's something about ‘Truck Still Works’ that threaded the needle in a way I've never heard of. So now it's like, 'Let's wade back into the pool'".

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Featured photo by Kendall Wilson