poptimists | Brad Paisley Ticks (Reply)

He was interviewed in EW this week, and Paisley talked about how important this song was, because Country talked about being outdoors. Now, this song is about the eternal joys of having sex outside (and it has some real naughty lines, esp. for someone who proclaims his class and from someone whose last great hit was about Mama and Jesus.)

The problem is that country rarely talks about the outdoors anymore, except as a playground, and ideas of nature have become a playground for the suburban. The song then, is kind of creepy--he wants to take a woman from the bar, and bring her to a secluded "moonlit" meadow, where he will strip her, and "crawl all over her". The checking for ticks sounds like a cute cover for something sinister.

I never really got Paisley, his realtionship to women has been courtly in that suburban megachurch kind of way, and this is the first time that he has ever sung something explicit in its eroticism, and done another way, it could have destabilised the outdoors/suburban;bar/moonlight dialectic that infuses much country.

But the way he sings it, it has a serial killer vibe.