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" This week, obscenely best-selling country singer-songwriter/guitar wizard Brad Paisley stopped off in New York to do some press, before heading to Philadelphia to kick off his latest world tour. The tour is sponsored by Kraft, and thus every flat surface in his room at the Trump International Hotel was covered with every imaginable expression of Kraft cheese. The man loves cheese. After convincing me to try a bagel with chocolate cream cheese on it, we sat down and talked a bit about why country musicians are so friendly, and how hard it is to write a simple tune that resonates with huge numbers of people.  ESQUIRE: There&amp;#039;s a real code of courtesy and friendliness that you see in country music that you don&amp;#039;t see in any other genre, or really any other art form. Even if you&amp;#039;re a huge star, there&amp;#039;s still an obligation to come across as an approachable guy. Where&amp;#039;s that come from?  BRAD PAISLEY: That&amp;#039;s important in life\u2014there&amp;#039;s no reason to be any other way\u2014but I think it&amp;#039;s also about the size of our industry, as far as the town, and the geography of it. It&amp;#039;s the south, it&amp;#039;s Nashville, it&amp;#039;s a little million-person city. And within that million-person city, there&amp;#039;s a couple of streets where it&amp;#039;s all recorded and marketed. You start making people mad on 16th or 17th Avenue, and you&amp;#039;re gonna run out of options quick. You can&amp;#039;t afford to burn a bridge.  You can&amp;#039;t. But also there&amp;#039;s a history of it in country music. It goes back to the way it began. George D. Hay, the guy who called the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights, used to tell his bands before they went out, &amp;quot;Keep it close to the ground, boys.&amp;quot; You gotta be down to earth, or at least act like you&amp;#039;re down to earth, if you want to be in our industry. When you were starting out, did anyone give you any good advice about that? Yeah. I remember Bill Anderson telling me when I was on the Opry early on, they were about to open the curtain, and Bill said, &amp;quot;Look out there at those people. You treat &amp;#039;em right, they&amp;#039;re not going anywhere. Ever. They&amp;#039;ll never leave.&amp;quot; And that&amp;#039;s not something you can say about other types of entertainment. They&amp;#039;re gonna leave, inevitably, they just are. But not in country music. You see it at live shows, too, the sense that the performers are sort of there to serve the crowd. It&amp;#039;s like rock and roll backwards.  BP: It is rock and roll backwards. That&amp;#039;s a great way to put it. I sense that from the audiences that I play for. They&amp;#039;re there, and they&amp;#039;re wondering what you&amp;#039;re going to bring to them. They want you to represent them. They want you to connect with them. That has to do everything to do with lyrics, with the fact that our songs are about specifics. They&amp;#039;re about lifestyle, quite often.  There&amp;#039;s much more of a burden on country musicians to be understood.  There is. With rock you can be figurative, you can free-associate, the lines can be disconnected.  And it&amp;#039;s always cooler to do that in rock and roll. You can blame the Beatles for that. They started it. It started with &amp;quot;I Want to Hold Your Hand,&amp;quot; and then blam! &amp;quot;Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.&amp;quot; It was the best thing that could have happened to rock, because it opened up an entirely different palate. But in country\u2014we&amp;#039;re smack dab in the middle of trying to get this album done. We master on Wednesday. And what do you think the most common critique is when I&amp;#039;m playing mixes for management, the label, friends, family, anyone?  What? It&amp;#039;s: What did you say there? Couldn&amp;#039;t understand the words. It&amp;#039;s always about hearing the words in country music.  Whereas rock can be deliberately obscure.  No kidding. I envy them that. There&amp;#039;s often this idea that country music is simplistic. But it&amp;#039;s deceptively simple. To write a great song that pulls people along, and has your narrative thread, and has your lines that will stick with people\u2014 It&amp;#039;s much a harder thing to do than people realize, and the simpler it gets, the harder it is. That&amp;#039;s the thing. We&amp;#039;re screenwriters, is what we are. We do three act plays. It&amp;#039;s just in music. First act the guy says, She&amp;#039;s late on our first date, but I don&amp;#039;t mind waitin&amp;#039; on a woman. The second verse is him standing on the altar forever. There he is again, waitin&amp;#039; on a woman. And what&amp;#039;s the third act? The third act is this: Statistics say man&amp;#039;s always the first to go. I know what&amp;#039;s gonna happen. And when it does, I&amp;#039;m gonna find a bench up there, and I&amp;#039;m gonna be waiting on a woman. That&amp;#039;s like that song, &amp;quot;On the Back Row.&amp;quot; One of the last lines of the third act is the guy sitting there in church, watching the woman he loves marry another man, and he sings, &amp;quot;Maybe she&amp;#039;ll outlive him, or he might even do her wrong.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s absolutely shattering. It&amp;#039;s the most desperate, perfect line. It&amp;#039;s amazing! It&amp;#039;s the perfect line. And it wouldn&amp;#039;t work if the thing wasn&amp;#039;t meticulously structured.  It wouldn&amp;#039;t. It&amp;#039;s a different type of art form.  Do you ever feel constrained by it?  I don&amp;#039;t. It actually invigorates you, if you know what to do. It&amp;#039;s a great way to write. I mean, it&amp;#039;s probably what I would imagine someone like Robert Lopez does when he&amp;#039;s writing a musical. If you&amp;#039;re gonna write a musical for Broadway, you&amp;#039;re gonna sit there and you&amp;#039;re gonna think of these couple hundred people sitting in those seats. If you write it and you&amp;#039;re not thinking about the way it&amp;#039;ll affect them, you&amp;#039;re done. That&amp;#039;s gonna close in two days. But if you are 100 percent in tune with what they desire when they walk into that theater, then you will write for them.  And you don&amp;#039;t have to sell out anything. There&amp;#039;s nothing cheap about it. It&amp;#039;s Andy Warhol doing something that is so simple that everybody wants it. That, at times, is more of an art form than something that&amp;#039;s 100 percent personal that no one else understands. For me, the real art form is putting together an album and a tour that go hand in hand, where the people watching me play a song are the same people who&amp;#039;ve had it on in their cars. Why wouldn&amp;#039;t I want that to be something that brings them up out of their seats? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a28647/brad-paisley-country-music/>