When Iman asked me to review the song ‘The World’ by Brad Paisley, I thought, what? Brad Paisley, the country guy? I was vaguely remembering his name,… isn’t he really big in the country business?
Country fans, you have to forgive me, I don’t listen to this type of music, since Nashville has become some corporate machine that produces clones of boring, unsurprising and repetitive songs over and over.
But I’ve checked, and Brad Paisley is effectively huge by any standards, he was the 2008 CMA and ACM Male Vocalist of the Year winner, his seven studio albums were all certified gold or higher by the Recording Industry Association of America, 25 of his singles were on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, and 15 of them have reached number 1. There is an endless list of Grammy and other Awards on his wikipedia page, and he has performed at the White House, ‘Welcome to the Future’, the first country song played for Obama.
From all I can see, Brad Paisley, with his cowboy hat permanently screwed on his head, his average guy good-looks, a 2009 album entitled ‘American Saturday night’, and not a single gossip about him to dish out, seems to be the quintessence of the good American guy.
‘The World’ from his 2005 ‘Time well Wasted’ album, is a relatively fast song that follows all country music conventions, but with his use of fiddle and pedal steel, there is something closer to the tradition than some average song coming from Nashville I have randomly heard. Past the shock you are really listening to a plain Country song in the full sense of the term, you could find the song likable and almost charming.
And then there are the lyrics, that you could consider cute and sweet: the world treats you as an ordinary woman, ‘But to me/Baby you are the world’,… so direct and simple. Or you could think he is saying to his girlfriend she should be happy to be his girlfriend, because basically this is all she is! Ha women with no identity, only defined by their man! Some conventional cliché but what do you want, it’s country music!
However I don’t know if he meant that, I don’t know the guy after all, and some have said he puts a lot of humor and sarcasm in his lyrics, so…