Diary of a Player (23 page)

The album gave me a chance to tip the hat to some of the people whose inspiration has gotten me this far. For example,
Play
featured “More Than Just This Song,” the song that Steve Wariner and I had written and recorded for our beloved guitar teachers Chet Atkins and Hank Goddard. I also did something magical and once-in-a-lifetime by taking the demo of the song “Come on In”—something new that Buck Owens wrote and recorded in his office—and turning it into a duet for the two of us. Including Buck on the
Play
album also gave me one more chance to pay my respects to the legacy of Telecaster history that Buck almost single-handedly ushered in.

The album gave me a chance to tip the hat to some of the people whose inspiration has gotten me this far.

Finally, there is a little number called “Cluster Pluck” that in less than four minutes let me grow my very own twangy Telecaster family tree, which featured me playing with the likes of James Burton, Vince Gill, Albert Lee, John Jorgenson, Brent Mason, Redd Volkaert, and Steve Wariner. If you want to hear who I really am as a guitar player, you can add up all of those amazing musicians and see my roots showing.

For that reason, it meant the world to me when “Cluster Pluck” won the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental in 2009. Whatever else I may do, I consider it to be one of my crowning achievements that I got to be part of the reason some of our finest guitar players
ever
—James Burton, John Jorgenson, Albert Lee, Brent Mason, and Redd Volkaert—could now call themselves Grammy winners. On the other hand, Vince Gill and Steve Wariner were already Grammy winners, but hey, guys, you're welcome.

It ain't hip to sing about tractors, trucks, little towns, and mama, yeah that might be true.
But this is country music and we do.

—“This Is Country Music,” written by Brad Paisley and Chris DuBois

C
ountry music is many things to many people. At its best, country music gives us pictures of our lives as they develop before our eyes.

More than any album I've ever made and maybe ever will make,
American Saturday Night
—released in June 2009—reflected what was going on in the world at that moment and what was happening in my own little world with my family. Our personal world was expanding too. I recorded
American Saturday Night
just as Kim and I were preparing to welcome our second child into this world—Jasper Warren, named in honor of my late grandfather. We took Jasper home, where his big brother Huck couldn't wait to warmly welcome him. And soon enough fight with him as well.

Becoming a parent changes the way you see yourself and the world. I'm not the first to say that, I know. I think it's safe to
say that you can see a lot of those changes all over the
American Saturday Night
album. Take the song “Welcome to the Future.” When I was writing this song with Chris DuBois, there were really three things I wanted that song to do all at once. The idea was to show you our world today not only through my eyes, but also through the eyes of my grandfather and my young sons—and to serve up a little multigenerational truth with a strong sense of hope and possibility.

Being a dad now, I was well aware that I was making music that my kids may actually hear someday, and I think that awareness hit home in the best way. As a parent, you tend to feel so much more than you have ever felt before. Having a child is to have your heart go walking around without you. Just about the best and most joyful out-of-body experience that I know. On the
American Saturday Night
album, I made a decision not to shy away from writing about everything that I was experiencing, and as a result, the album became a kind of musical autobiography in a way I'd never dared try before. I just decided to let the album be what it would be—whether that meant writing about Kim, about my sons on a song like “Anything Like Me,” or just about myself and all the thoughts running around my head at the time.

But to be a parent is also to take the state of the world
a little more seriously, and
American Saturday Night
was also written in the midst of a presidential election, so I had to take a longer look at the whole world through a new set of eyes. Frankly, I don't really care if you're a Republican, a Democrat, Tea Party, Sausage Party, or whatever party knocks you out, but I think we can all take just a moment to be amazed at the remarkable changes all around us.

I don't really care if you're a Republican, a Democrat, Tea Party, Sausage Party, or whatever party knocks you out, but I think we can all take just a moment to be amazed at the remarkable changes all around us.

My grandfather went to the Philippines during World War II to fight the Japanese, and now a few generations later I record for Sony Records and have toured twice in Japan. By the same token, a lot of us grew up under the impression that a black man didn't have a chance at becoming president of the United States. As a parent, I'm happy that my kids will no longer think the color of your skin determines who is eligible to hold that high office. So as a very proud American who has been able to live my own version of the American Dream, I was very honored to go to the White House in July 2009 and do my first live performance of “Welcome to the Future” for our president and the
First Lady as part of “A Country Music Celebration.” This celebration brought me together with Alison Krauss and with my first famous fan, Charley Pride, who'd made a point of cheering me on back when I was a kid at the Wheeling Jamboree.

And now, a few short years later, the same kid who was given a Sears Silvertone guitar on his eighth Christmas had written and recorded his way to performing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I know of no other Christmas gift that could possibly contain this much potential to shape a life.

In retrospect,
American Saturday Night
feels like a unique album for me. As I write these words, I am readying my next record,
This Is Country Music
. The album feels like a very different chapter, less personal, more rootsy.
This Is Country Music
isn't really about any large issues or even necessarily about me. Just the other night, I realized that a lot of my songs on the
ASN
album start with the word “I.” Not the new record—for some reason, a lot of the new songs begin with words like “she,” or “you're,” or “he.” If there's a thread to
This Is Country Music,
then it's about storytelling and looking at life from a perspective bigger than my own.

Speaking of bigger, the tours I was taking to bring all these musical stories to the people got larger and larger as I hit the road in the wake of
American Saturday Night
. But as we prepared
to launch my biggest show yet, the H20 Tour—named in honor of my single “Water”—we had no idea what was about to happen.

J
ust as we were making final preparations to launch the first leg of the H20 Tour in May 2010, something happened that changed the way I look at touring, and my crew, forever. In the first two days of May, over nineteen inches of rain fell on Nashville, and the Cumberland River rose and crested at more than fifty feet—a level it hadn't reached since 1937. Tragically, there were twenty-one deaths reported in Tennessee, and more souls lost in Mississippi and Kentucky too. The floods displaced thousands in Tennessee and tremendously damaged many of Nashville's most familiar landmarks, including the Opryland Hotel, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, and the Grand Ole Opry House itself.