Published on Jan 31, 2006
The fun thing about a reasonably intelligent artist
working in the country genre is, there are just so damn many
stereotypes to rebel against. And while Time Well Wasted
might not smash as many boundaries as, say, Brokeback
Mountain, it does a fair job of expanding horizons, while also
paying homage to the past.
Paisley, who first came to attention as a precocious
teenaged talent sharing stages with much bigger stars at the Grand
Ole Opry, has matured into a full-fledged star himself, and this
disc finds him near the top of his game. He writes or co-writes
most of these songs, and they are sprinkled with a keen
self-awareness and biting sense of humor that push the envelope
until the album feels in places like a parody of a country album…
and then he reels you back in with a big-hearted ballad right out
of the George Jones/George Strait new traditionalist school.
That dichotomy — between rebellion against and
embrace of country music traditions — makes Time Well
Wasted feel like an album Garth Brooks could have made, if he
hadn’t been so busy being GARTH BROOKS all the time. It’s
big-hearted, earnest, lovable and fun — the main difference being,
Paisley’s humor has a distinctly self-mocking edge.
“Alcohol,” for example, catalogs the many things that
result from and/or get blamed on the title substance, but saves the
sharpest skewer for Paisley & co., punching up a chorus line
about “helping white people dance.” “I’ll Take You Back” is a
brilliantly wicked four-minute compendium of bitter-breakup
one-liners (e.g. “When politicians everywhere stop telling lies /
And only state the facts / Right then, that’s when / I’ll take you
back.”). “You Need A Man Around Here” is more standard country fare
in its good ole boy posture towards a feminine household, but
country music doesn’t get much better than lines like this: “I
haven’t been in a room this clean / Since they took my appendix
out.”
The weak spot on the album is the ballads. Paisley
has a big, pleasant voice, and he layers the slower songs here with
a straight-laced earnestness that seems intended to balance the
humor he pushes in other songs. Which is all well and good from a
marketing perspective, but the songs themselves — with a couple of
exceptions — are fairly predictable affairs. The exceptions would
be “Waitin’ On A Woman,” whose gently sexist premise nonetheless
builds to a punchline that’s both witty and moving, and “Love Is
Never-Ending,” which just felt so damn sincere it sucked me in.
In the category of the inexplicable lies the
quote-unquote bonus track, “Cornography,” which finds Paisley,
George Jones, Bill Anderson, Little Jimmy Dickens and Dolly Parton
doing some kind of wacked-out radio play that makes no sense
whatsoever, is riddled with double entendres involving Parton’s two
most notable assets, and ends up making you laugh not at the
routine itself, but at the pure dementedness it took to put this on
an album in the first place.
There are things you might criticize Brad Paisley
for, but taking himself or his music too seriously is not one of
them. For the most part, this album is a hoot.