Brad Paisley says that when he writes songs he is a “visual writer.” The country music superstar has been writing songs for almost his entire life. While he writes country music, he feels the best written songs in all genres are visual as well as musical.
“I write very visually,” Brad states, “My idea of country music is always about the pictures it paints for you. I don’t like songs that don’t give me images in my mind … in country music that is. Even in pop music.”
Thinking about those pop songs Brad continues, “You think about great pop songs that you love, sometimes you don’t always know what they mean, but there’s some great words in there.”
He uses one of the mega-hit songs from one of the greatest bands of all-time in any genre, the Eagles, “‘Hotel California’ is a good example. I don’t know totally what that’s about, but you know, ‘On a dark desert highway,’ cool you know, it’s just … you see everything they’re sayin’.”
With 11 studio albums that have produced 24 number one singles, Brad has painted many pictures during his career. To take the idea of visual writing and expand on it, he must feel like the music is the canvas and the words are the paint.
With that in mind, listen for Brad’s latest single “Last Time For Everything” on B104 and see what pictures it creates for you. With lines like “Getting caught with a girl in the backseat of a car,” “Or telling Supercuts, ‘Let’s leave it long in the back’,” “Spending all day on the lake with your granddad” and “Getting woke up at 5 am to see if Santa came” among many more some of the pictures the song paints might have you smiling and laughing in remembrance.
You can watch Brad’s visual interpretation of his latest single “Last Time For Everything” in the music video at the bottom of the page. The song can be found on his latest collection of musical pictures, his #1 country album called Love And War that is available everywhere.
Keep visually writing those songs Brad, we love what we see when we listen to them.
By: Buck Stevens
