Brad Paisley: American Saturday Night

Brad Paisley tries to capture a slice of life—fishing trips, marriage proposals, swimming in the creek. He tells stories, which taken separately sound trite, each offering a heavy-handed moral. Combined though, he manages to capture a simple, rosy picture of middle America—the one where hard-working folks struggle to get by and all the while find happiness in the little things. The music is unabashedly country, never straying from the genre’s bedrock of ten-gallon-hat instrumentation. Often the songs seem done to death (“No” is a less poetic version of Garth Brooks’ “Unanswered Prayers”), but as an album, it’s tolerable.

Rating: * * *

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