Happy Father’s Day to Brad Paisley.
Brad, dad to Huck and Jasper, does his best – like all parent to pass down worthy advice to his kids, “One thing I told my kids was, ‘as long as you believe in what you are doing in life and you know what you did is good, then I will be proud of you.’ And that was really advice for me.”
Of course, Brad’s dad, Doug, dished out some honest advice to him when he was starting his career in music, “My dad used to tell me when I was playing music as a kid because I started playing live music at 10 or 11. Playing a little band I had at 13 and singing… I was booked pretty solid in this little town where we were from because I was a novelty act. It was a 12 year old standing there and singing Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the USA,’ you can’t go wrong (laughter). That’s just money in the bank. But he used to say, ‘you’re pretty good for 12, but when you’re 18 you gotta be better than this because you won’t be cute anymore.’ He would never mince words that way, and that was truly good advice. And something that I think people need to realize. At some point you gotta get good at something. At first, maybe you worked your way to where you are getting’ but get good at it! This is a day and age where everybody thinks you can just do an embarrassing video and post it on Instagram and have a few seconds of fame, but do something else. Go get good at something.”
Along with his dad being a major influence in his life, Brad’s grandfather actually started Paisley out on the life path that he’s on today. Brad received his very first guitar from his grandfather for Christmas was he was a boy.
The two would play together, but recalls a time when one of the sessions led to a bit of heated debate between grandfather and grandson. “My grandpa and I had an argument back when I first started playin’ the guitar…well, not first…I guess I’d been playin’ for a couple years. And we were best buddies. And I came up the alley all upset, and I told my dad that he got mad at me. My dad called, and said, ‘What happened? What did you guys have a fight about?’ And he was hemmin’ and hawin’ around a little bit, and we’d been playin’ the guitar, and I guess I had showed him how to do somethin’, and he wasn’t gettin’ it. And I might’ve been a little short with him, and he ended up being a lot short with me. And long story short, he got mad at me because, he said, ‘Well, Doug, truth is, he did it better than I did.’ And he was just kind of mad at himself at the same time that he was really proud of me. And that’s pretty wild, and I remember that, and boy, no one would be prouder now.”
Happy Father’s Day to Brad Paisley, and all the other dad’s out there…
Photo Credit: Jeff Lipsky
