Brad Paisley Talks Switching Gears With ‘Truck Still Works’: ‘It Takes Them to a Place Where They Feel Good’
Here’s how nostalgic Brad Paisley is: “I find myself before an amazing event is even finished thinking, ‘Oh man, this is really gonna be a bummer when it’s over!’,” he says.
So it should come as no surprise that the country star decided to look back at a historic chapter in his life and career when creating “Truck Still Works,” his new single that drops today on EMI Music. The song serves as a companion of sorts to 1994’s charming, uplifting “Mud on the Tires,” which became one of his biggest hits.
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The catchy, mid-tempo tune, which Paisley premiered on the People’s Choice Country Awards Thursday night (Sept. 26) as a medley with “Mud on the Tires,” questions if he and his female companion can turn a truck that’s been sitting dormant for years into a wayback machine that can transport them back to an earlier, care-free time. As the lyrics ask, they can “see if them miles of corn still got that shade of green” or “find out if that dogwood limb is still there to hang our shirts.” “It’s no more complicated than the nostalgia of it,” Paisley says of the song. “We all want to recapture certain aspects of life.”
When “Truck Still Works” co-writers Rodney Clawson, Will Bundy and Hunter Phelps first approached Paisley and DuBois, who co-wrote “Mud on the Tires,” about revisiting that song in some manner, the trio expressed apprehension about stepping on the Paisley/DuBois classic. However, Paisley says, “Chris and I were like, ‘Oh no! Lean in!’ This is truly a sequel.”
It felt right and good to revisit that time again, Paisley says. “I look back on the Mud on the Tires era as an album and a time period where everything did sort of launch in a bigger way for me. ‘Mud on the Tires’ was a call to action, a metaphor, it felt like a lifestyle.” For Paisley, the title track became his fourth No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart and the album’s fourth Top 5 hit and further catapulted his career. To this day, Paisley ends his shows with “Mud on the Tires.” “If I don’t do it, people want their money back,” he says. “I can’t imagine my identity as an artist without that, so it’s really fun to kind of lean into this.”
Once they “leaned in,” the five co-writers had a blast planting Easter eggs in “Truck Still Works” that hark back to “Mud on the Tires, ” while still creating a song that felt “entirely new,” Paisley says. In addition to the lyrical references, Paisley even threw in musical reminders, such as using similar guitar patterns and chord inversions.
Those musical cues were enough for ardent fans, including Jelly Roll and Post Malone, to guess the song was a “Mud on the Tires” sequel based on a small snippet Paisley posted on Instagram and X earlier this week. “It’s fun to think back when Jelly was a young’un, he might have even bought ‘Mud on the Tires,’” Paisley says.
The throwbacks extend to the single artwork, which features the truck that Paisley had when “Mud on the Tires” came out and serves as his farm truck now.
The song intentionally doesn’t answer if the truck does, indeed, still work, leaving it up to the listener’s imagination. “That wouldn’t be cool,” he says, to bring the song back to reality. “It’s still the metaphor of it, the idea of can you recapture that thing when everything’s [now] different,” he says.
The song shifts sonic gears for Paisley who last September released Son of the Mountains: The First Four Tracks, an EP of a quartet of songs in part inspired by his growing up in West Virginia. The album tackled such serious subjects as the opioid crisis, which has hit his home state particularly hard, on “The Medicine Will.” It also looked at the ways we are all alike no matter where we’re from with “Same Here,” which featured a spoken word passage by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
That album is now on hold. “I ended up getting really excited about a few of these things that I started to write, and we came up with an entirely new project,” he says.
Given the weightiness of some of the topics on Son of the Mountains, Paisley wanted to take a break. “There’s a lot of it that’s very heavy. A lot of [the album] exists to deal with things and I don’t know if anybody really wants to deal with things right now. I don’t. And if I’m going to put the rest of that album out, I have to be willing to sort of discuss some very heavy things. I don’t know that I would even want to do that right now.”
Instead, he says the lighter fare on Truck Still Works is what “I think people really want to hear right now.”
The new album, which will likely come out in early 2025, will be his first full-length album since 2017 and his first since moving from Sony Nashville’s Arista imprint to Universal Music Group Nashville’s EMI Records. Paisley says “Truck” is a good indicator of the album’s direction.
“The project has some deeper things on it but, like the song itself, is really about creativity and nostalgia and you know the themes that you want to hear right now,” he says. “Sometimes, like in these times, it’s great to give people something they just want to turn up and takes them to a place where they feel good.”
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