From the beginning, Brad Paisley was typecast as a great hope of traditional country—the kind of guy who could carry the torch for George Strait, Garth Brooks, Randy Travis, and George Jones. His songs were funny, warm, and fresh, but also indifferent to trend. In a landscape about to be filled with baseball hats, Paisley hung on to his Stetson. On his first few albums, you could hear the gears turning. By 2005’s Time Well Wasted, it became second nature. Like Strait and Brooks, Paisley’s songs had an offhand brilliance, familiar enough to make you feel like you’d heard them before, but novel enough to remind you that you hadn’t. Traditional, yes, but never nostalgic. Instead, Paisley treated evergreen subjects—romance (“Waitin’ on a Woman”), youth (“Out In the Parkin’ Lot,” with Alan Jackson), spiritual salvation (“Where I Get Where I’m Going,” featuring Dolly Parton), and terrestrial pleasure (“Alcohol”)—like the same human preoccupations they’d been in country music for a hundred years. An interviewer later asked Paisley what he thought the most important ingredient in his success was. The songs, he said. Almost everything here could’ve been recorded 50 years earlier, some in more or less the same form. The distinction was subtle, but real: Nostalgia ties to you to the past. But tradition? You can take tradition wherever you go.