YMMV / Brad Paisley

• Broken Base:
  • Play is either a fun diversion for Brad to show off his guitar chops like never before, or self-indulgent noodling that had no reason to exist.
  • Wheelhouse seems to be a polarizing album: some critics and fans think that it's great, others think it's a bloated mess that tries way too hard to be "different" from his previous albums. Especially the track "Accidental Racist".
  • Depending on who you ask, "Then" is either one of his best or worst songs. It's either an emotional ballad, or a boring Cliché Storm.
• Cliché Storm:
  • "Then": "And now you're my whole life / Now you're my whole world / And I just can't believe the way I feel about you, girl"… etc. etc.
  • "Water" is rather cliché heavy too. Wet t-shirt contests and skinny dipping ceased to be titillating ages ago.
• Critical Dissonance: His albums still get generally high marks across the board. However, many fans feel that he's been phoning it in since about 5th Gear onward — main criticisms include "boring lyrics" ("Then"), "failed attempts at humor" ("Ticks", "Water", "Camouflage", "I'm Still a Guy"), and "uninspired singing" (his voice started getting a lot flatter after Time Well Wasted). This may finally be catching up with him, as in late 2011-early 2012, "Camouflage" became his first song since 2000 to miss the top 10. There are however still many fans of the later music, especially with Brad's singles in 'Franchise/Cars movies.
• Don't Shoot the Message: "Accidental Racist" provoked considerable backlash at the clumsy handling of a complex topic — namely, the lingering effects and divides from America's nasty history of slavery and racial segregation. While it is a very serious message which could work well, neither Brad Paisley or LL Cool J did a good job addressing it.
• Glurge: "This Is Country Music." Rule of thumb, avoid country songs that try to Make a Point about country songs.
• Heartwarming Moments: A few. "He Didn't Have to Be" is still arguably the best, but "Letter to Me" and "Last Time for Everything" work too.
  • Several of his "being open-minded is good" songs (except "Accidental Racist") can be touching, particularly for people who live in rural America but can't quite fit in there: "Welcome to the Future," "American Saturday Night," "Southern Comfort Zone," etc.
• Moment of Awesome: Starting with "When I Get Where I'm Going" and ending with "Then," Brad scored ten consecutive #1 hits on the Billboard country charts, the longest such streak by a country music artist in ages until Blake Shelton broke it.
• Narm: "Accidental Racist." Part of the reason for the entry below.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Wheelhouse had two #2 hits on the country charts, but it will likely be remembered almost entirely as "the album with 'Accidental Racist' on it".
• Seasonal Rot: This began to set in with either Time Well Wasted or 5th Gear, depending on who you ask. Things began to get better with Moonshine in the Trunk, and Love and War was acclaimed as a return to form.
• Signature Song: "Find Yourself" or "Collision of Worlds" due to Franchise/Cars movies. And "Whiskey Lullaby'' or "Remind Me" due to collabs.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • "Who Needs Pictures" is about the narrator finding a roll of film and pondering developing it before stating "Who needs pictures with a memory like mine". Only a few years later those pictures would be on a digital camera (which could still be justified if he has no immediate means of reading the memory card), and more contemporarily they'd be instantly accessible on any smartphone.
  • A minor example. When "Online" came out, everyone had a MySpace, so he mentioned it. He now changes the line to "Go check out my Facebook page" when he sings it live.
• Values Dissonance: "Ticks", which uses "I'd like to check you for ticks" as a pickup line:
  Paisley: “Working out here on the farm, I literally have to check for ticks every time I come in from the woods or the fields. Now, if a young guy who lives in the country were to take a girl into the woods for any reason, it would totally cross his mind that she’s going to have to check for ticks when they come back out. So it seems that an enterprising guy would at least consider that he could offer to check for her.”
• Win Back the Crowd: After the divisive Wheelhouse album, Paisley seems to have gotten back into critics' good graces with Moonshine in the Trunk.

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