Brad Paisley breaks the pattern

In the decade since country singer Brad Paisley put out his debut album, the kid from Glen Dale, W.Va., has concocted a savvy musical amalgam of Roger Miller's songwriting wit, Buck Owens' hard-rocking twang and Chet Atkins' guitar wizardry. But there's powerful evidence of another influence at work in Paisley's music, one of the titans of American popular culture: Mark Twain.

Like Twain's youthful literary hero Tom Sawyer, Paisley frequently couples wisdom with a finely honed sense of humor, and appears to share Huck Finn's disenchantment with the emphasis that all those grown-ups around him place on becoming "sivilized."

In hits such as "Online," "Celebrity" and "Ticks," he's proved to be a skillful sneak, slipping in the kind of clever ideas and wordplay that few of his peers at the top of the country sales charts dare to venture. He's tackled the subject of alcohol abuse from different vantage points in two hit songs, the whimsical "Alcohol" and the artistic punch to the gut "Whiskey Lullaby," his award-winning duet with bluegrass queen Alison Krauss.

Paisley's eighth album, "American Saturday Night," due out Tuesday, has the usual complement of straightforward love songs (the first single, "Then"), ruminations on love lost ("Oh Yeah, You're Gone") and humorous come-ons ("You Do the Math").

But what is likely to elevate Paisley's standing as a musician, both in and potentially outside of the Nashville music community, are two key tracks: the title song and "Welcome to the Future," both of which broach topics that also were favorites of Samuel Clemens.

"I'm getting into some subjects that don't come up very often in country music, like racism, and I think it's time," Paisley, 36, said in late April during the brisk walk from his tour bus toward the massive stage at the 2009 Stagecoach country music festival in Indio, which he co-headlined with Kenny Chesney, playing to some 40,000 to 50,000 fans.

In person, Paisley's as quick with a quip as you'd expect from his humor-laced songs and he has a gift for putting visitors quickly at ease with his long-lost-friend demeanor. He frequently exhibits an impressive attention to detail, whether it's concerning some facet of the stage setup for his live shows, the production work on a new recording or the musical equipment surrounding him.

Stagecoach was a cherry gig he couldn't pass up, but it meant briefly tearing himself away from wrapping up work on the album -- a collection that constitutes an important step forward for him, and for country music itself.