Since the release of his self-titled debut fifteen years ago, Doug Paisley has earned accolades for unflinchingly self-reflective songs delivered with simplicity and beauty. Though Paisley has always collaborated with topnotch Canadian musicians including luminaries like Garth Hudson, Leslie Feist, and Mary Margaret O’Hara, his records have drawn poignancy also from moments where the listener hears Paisley as he most often hears himself: unadorned and alone with his guitar. The critical response to Paisley’s sophomore release, Constant Companion, underlined this quality. MOJO, naming the album one of the top ten of 2010, found in its “rare kind of purity” evidence that “an anti-star is born”. While Rolling Stone deemed it to be a “nearly perfect singer-songwriter record”, UNCUT described it as “sure-footed and ageless… uncluttered, sad and unerringly lovely.” The “quiet and contemplative” nature of Paisley’s last record, Starter Home, continued this trend, earning it a place in The New Yorker’s top ten albums of 2018.

Now, Paisley announces his new record, Say What You Like, which underscores his prowess as a songwriter, while exploring new sonic terrain with producer Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas). He’s also sharing the album’s title track, of which Paisley says, “when something important disappears from your life your imagination is sometimes called upon to fill the gaps. You could fill another universe with all the things people imagine other people are saying or thinking about them. The second verse was written ten years after the first.”

Distilled from more than 250 unrecorded songs penned by Paisley over the last decade, the eleven tracks selected by Jurvanen combine folk, country, and pop sensibilities to showcase Paisley’s rich sense of melody and remarkable way with words. The final product is Paisley at his best – honest, exposed, searching – and yet comforting in his ability to communicate the universal in the struggles of the individual. In meditations on the disappointments and shortcomings of love, Paisley looks hard at middle age, and facing the time ‘when looking young is getting old.’ ‘We’re always somewhere in-between forever and walking away / we’ll spend a lifetime, you and me, day by day.’ One cannot help but get the sense from these songs that Paisley simply must write – it's about emotional survival and the process of working through. “As a songwriter these days,” Paisley reflected earlier this year, “there’s very little to gain and very little to lose so I am working only from the heart, there’s no other motive.” It shows.