Last Thoughts on Brad Paisley 5th Gear

5th Gear is a nice country record. To enjoy it, you’ll need to be open to new country in the first place, but if you’ve ever dabbled in Tim McGraw, Keith Urban, Shania, Faith, even The Dixie Chicks—I think you’ll find some redeeming qualities in Brad Paisley’s 5th Gear. Let’s highlight a few:

A Real Duet:
I found the duets to be contrived and corporate on Bon Jovi’s Lost Highway record. My feeling on duets is they should feel like an art house movie. The reason Harvey Keitel and Parkey Posey show up in some little indie picture is both actors thought the script was too good to pass up. A duet should be the same, only the script is the song. There needs to be a sense that both singers regardless of their fame simply couldn’t pass up the chance to sing this one. It’s not about singing with the other person as much as it is a mutual admiration for the song itself. Both singers must truly love the work.

5th Gear has this with a Carrie Underwood duet titled “Oh Love.” The lyric is Hemmingway sparse, and the song manages to sound both simple and important at the same time. It doesn’t hurt that Carrie Underwood has the same nose as Elvis either. I’m not joking, check it out. I’m a big fan. There’s a moment in “Oh Love” where I thought to myself that they should let the lyric explode a bit, but that wouldn’t have been right for the song. And a good duet is all about the song. “Oh Love” hits all the marks.

Again there are plenty of stories and plenty of guitars on 5th Gear. “If Love Was a Plane” shows how amazing our resolve is to keep falling into love when the success rate would be unthinkable when applied to anything else –in this case air travel. “With You, Without You” allows Paisley to riff a bit more on his guitar. And “Better Than This” carries on 5th Gear’s overall glass half full theme as Paisley imagines several hyperbolic ways (Waylon and Willie showing up to play requests for instance) things could, in fact, get better.

There’s a term hockey players use a lot when describing other players. They’ll say he’s a “tough, honest player.” In many ways 5th Gear is a “tough, honest” album. It has a prevailing theme in optimism. It has the country stories. It has the had-to-be-there duet. It has some masterwork picking (“Throttleneck”). It contains 16 hard working songs, albeit a few of them silly. But I can see why it’s tough to keep for Target to keep this CD in stock. Especially up here in Minnesota during cabin season.