Brad Paisley goes for two straight at CMT Awards

Tonight, Brad Paisley fans will have their eyes glued to CMT at 8 pm, as the venerable country music network holds their annual CMT Music Awards show, featuring the top-selling artist and a skyful of country music’s brightest stars.

Paisley is nominated for Video of the Year and Male Video of the year with his excellent single “Waiting on a Woman” (having already won the CMA Award and the ACM Award in that category already), as well as for Collaborative Video of the Year with Keith Urban for “Start a Band” and CMT Performance of the Year for his part in “Country Boy” with Alan Jackson, George Strait and Dierks Bentley.

A complete list of Paisley’s awards is a litany of country music’s most prestigious, and includes three Grammy Awards, and he’s credited by Billboard Magazine with selling over a million copies of each of his seven albums, and no fewer than fourteen number-one singles on the Hot Country Songs charts. His current single, “Then”, is sitting atop the charts as of this writing.

He’s also known as a great entertainer who always has something new and exciting for concert-goers. His current tour, which kicked off June 5 in Charlotte, NC, is in support of his newest album “American Saturday Night”, scheduled to be released on June 30 on Arista Nashville, a show that the Boston Globe described as brimming with “style, energy, and grace” from “one of contemporary country music’s most likeable and gifted musicians”.

“No one can make the album they made 10 years ago with a straight face,” Paisley told Billboard Magazine. “You change as a person. To be a true artist, I have to be true to who I am now and write that way." And his new effort show that evolution, as the artist, now with two small boys, has seen the way he views the world change, through their eyes.

Besides, Paisley feels that he couldn’t just crank out another top-selling record with the lighthearted sway of his previous efforts, given the current economic climate and the way his fellow countrymen are hurting. “I think everybody's got one eye with angst on the problems in our country and society, but their other eye is on all this hope of things getting better,” Paisley told Entertainment Weekly.

The songwriter did his best to encapsulate that vibe even in the lighter title track. “I'm just trying to keep one eye on our times, and the other eye on the weekend,” he told EW.

Perhaps one might expect such evolution from a singer/songwriter who got his first guitar as a gift from his grandfather at age eight, then went on to become an opening act for The Judds, Ricky Scaggs and George Jones at the Capital Music Hall at age thirteen, before eventually being inducted into the Grand Ole Opry himself.

So tonight, as you watch Paisley take the stage, brimming with energy, remember that there’s a deeper side to the often-funny and always amiable artist, one that isn’t easily appreciated without reflection on his full catalog, aside from those chart-topping hits he’s most well-known for.

And if it seems he’s brushing aside the more serious view of life in America, recall that sometimes, we all just need a laugh.

Fiind music by Brad Paisley here.