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DOUG PAISLEY’S NEW LP, SAY WHAT YOU LIKE, PRODUCED BY AFIE JURVANEN, SET FOR RELEASE MARCH 17, 2023 VIA OUTSIDE MUSIC
PRE-SAVE SAY WHAT YOU LIKE HERE
“Produced by Bahamas' Afie Jurvanen, Say What You Like's 11 songs were distilled from more than 250 unrecorded tracks written by Paisley over the last decade. Folding folk, country and pop sensibilities into Paisley's sterling writing, it's another showcase of the songwriter's carefully wrought universe.” EXCLAIM! (Most Anticipated Canadian Albums ‘23)
Photo Credit : Dave Gillespie // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Late last year, Doug Paisley announced his upcoming album, Say What You Like, and shared the title track from the record. Today, he returns with another track from the LP, “Sometimes It’s So Easy”, complete with a video from director Colin Medley.
“This is a song for the leaving kind and the left behind, at the moment when one can seem so cold and cruel and the other so wounded,” says Paisley. “In the end, to right themselves, the price they pay in their own time is about equal. It makes me think of Bob Marley's ‘Running Away’ although this song is less sure of having taken its own advice. I'm inspired by the intricacy in simple folk and country songwriting where a little irony can suspend a point or an idea without bringing it down too hard in any one place, like an X-wing in a dogfight. For that reason I hope I haven't said very much here but if you're in a situation where there's blame and hurt then you know you still have a way to go, if you were fortunate enough to be there at all.”
Of the video, Paisley says “this is the first time I've made a music video for one of my songs. I risked my body and my 1950 Gibson guitar for the stunt and in hindsight I guess it lines up with some of the recklessness in the song itself.”
Director Colin Medley adds that “Doug told me that when he was a teenager he once biked from Mount Pleasant Cemetery all the way to the waterfront with no hands. I'm not sure I fully believed him, but when we showed up on the Toronto Islands to film this video, not only could he still effortlessly bike without touching his handlebars, he could do so while singing and playing guitar for take after take. It was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen.”
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MORE ABOUT DOUG PAISLEY
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.
WATCH / SHARE “SAY WHAT YOU LIKE” HERE
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MORE ABOUT SAY WHAT YOU LIKE
Distilled from more than 250 unrecorded songs penned by Paisley over the last decade, the eleven tracks selected by Afie 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.
PRE-SAVE SAY WHAT YOU LIKE HERE
SAY WHAT YOU LIKE TRACKLIST
01 Say What You Like
02 Sometimes It’s So Easy
03 Wide Open Plain
04 Rewrite History
05 Almost
06 If I Wanted To
07 I Wanted It Too Much
08 Make It A Double
09 You Turn My Life Around
10 Holy Roller
11 Old Hometown