Brad Paisley turns up the fun on latest album

Spears has stayed quiet on the reason for the break-up, keeping her focus on her two sons and her show in Las Vegas.

Brad Paisley is taking control of the conversation about Brad Paisley with the release of his new album, Moonshine in the Trunk. The unexpected criticism he and rapper LL Cool J received over the song Accidental Racist, which was leaked ahead of Paisley’s 2013 album Wheelhouse, still stings, and Paisley says he felt — and still feels — betrayed.

“I’m not going to take this anymore,” Paisley said. “I’m not going to take it when they tell me, ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ I’m a musician. Don’t tell me I shouldn’t have done that. I am going to say what I want to say, and this album is what I want to say right now.”

Paisley enlisted friends old and new — Ellen DeGeneres, NASCAR’s Jeff Gordon and even a NASA astronaut — to help him leak every song on Moonshine in the Trunk before its August 26 release, trading jabs with his record label boss along the way.

“Whatever critic wants to give it two stars, I don’t care,” Paisley said. “Because guess what? People know better, they’ve heard it. They’ve heard it, and I got the first presentation of it.”

This time, when Paisley does take on progressive ideas, he does so in a way designed not to offend in any way. He calls it “a sort of bright sides at all costs thing.”

Chris DuBois, Paisley’s close friend and business partner for two decades, said the sudden furore over Accidental Racist left its mark on Paisley. The song was meant to be an exploration of the state of race relations, with Paisley and LL Cool J offering different perspectives. Each managed to anger critics with lyrics that were dissected in the blogosphere.

“It was disappointing because of how badly the song was misinterpreted,” DuBois said. “It came from a real honest place where he was wanting to address the reality of racial tension in America and especially in respect to the South.”

Reaction to the song gut-punched the album upon release: Though Wheelhouse debuted at number one on Billboard’s country chart, it sold just over 100,000 copies its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. And the 41-year-old singer says he still felt some pushback as he rolled out Moonshine, starting with lead single River Bank. The song recently peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.

“What I don’t like is that I’m held to a way higher standard than other people,” Paisley said. “It’s not fair in this town. When I do River Bank and they go, ‘Well, what else you got,’ because it doesn’t do the things that everybody is complaining about, you know what I’m saying?”

Paisley looks at how things have changed for women in Shattered Glass, inspired by his wife, actress Kimberly Williams-Paisley, and her experiences with a career in entertainment. And he wrote American Flag on the Moon, a song about human potential, after his son looked at the moon and said he thought he could see the flag once planted there by astronauts. The chorus begins, “Tonight I dare you to dream, go on and believe in impossible things.”

“I’m sure there are people who would criticise it for its naiveté,” Paisley said. “But honestly I prefer to be naive if it means hopeful. The most naive of us might actually achieve something because they’re too naive to know that that’s not possible.”