Brad Paisley on Fish, Phish, and the Origins of the "Lost" Paisley Guitar
Wong Notes
Premier Guitar
4.9 • 587 Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2025
⏱️ 84 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Welcome back for a special season finale of Wong Notes!
We’ve saved one of the best for last: Brad Paisley.The celebrated shredder and seasoned fisherman joins host Cory Wong for one of this season’s most interesting episodes. Paisley talks his earliest guitar-playing influences, which came from his grandfather’s love of country music, and his first days in Nashville—as a student at Belmont University, studying the music industry.
The behind-the-curtain knowledge he picked up at Belmont made him a good match for industry suits trying to force bad contracts on him.
Wong and Paisley swap notes on fishing and a mutual love of Phish—Paisley envies the jam-band scene, which he thinks has more leeway in live contexts than country. And with a new signature Fender Telecaster hitting the market in a rare blue paisley finish, Paisley discusses his iconic namesake pattern—which some might describe as “hippie puke”—and its surprising origin with Elvis’ guitarist James Burton.
Plus, hear how Paisley assembled his rig over the years, the state of shredding on mainstream radio, when it might be good to hallucinogenic drugs in a set, and the only negative thing about country-music audiences.
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Produced by Jason Shadrick and Cory Wong
Additional Editing by Shawn Persinger
Presented by DistroKid
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What's happening? Welcome to Wong Notes podcast. I'm your host, Corey Wong. Today's the season finale, and we have one of my favorite guitar players on the planet, Brad Paisley. I've been trying to get Paisley since season one, no joke. And finally, we got to hang, jam a little bit at the Fender Showroom in Nashville. Got to know each other, had a great time, good hang, talked Steely Dan, talked guitars. We jammed. We didn't even go to the five chord and we just looked at each other. One of my, I won't name it. One of my friends was playing bass and he just like wouldn't change chords and i were kind of |
| 0:38.6 | look at each other the whole time like yo we're going to resolve we're going to go somewhere and we ended up |
| 0:44.2 | laughing and it was a good time and then we went into some other jams and blah blah blah it was a man |
| 0:49.8 | it was fun brad is an incredible guitar player I'm so excited about the conversation that we had. |
| 0:55.1 | It was a good one. And you know what? I'm also excited because I got a couple other fun things |
| 1:00.2 | going on. Fearless Flyers, new album comes out this week. We got a little vinyl pre-order going. Go |
| 1:06.6 | check it out. If you're not familiar, it is a four-piece ensemble with myself on guitar, |
| 1:12.3 | Mark Letcherry on baritone guitar, Joe Dart on bass, and the incredible Nate Smith on drums. |
| 1:18.5 | Fearless Flyers 5 coming at you. Also, I just announced 12 intimate shows at the Blue Note, New York. |
| 1:27.2 | I am doing some shows with my rhythm section. |
| 1:30.6 | Plus, I've got special guests, Joshua Redman, Mark LaTierry, Taylor Ixte. |
| 1:36.5 | It's going to be insane. |
| 1:37.8 | Go check it out. |
| 1:38.9 | It's going to be fun. |
| 1:40.3 | We're doing these in beginning in November, I think like the 4th through the 9th, 6 nights, 2 shows per night. |
| 1:46.2 | It's going to be insane. It's going to be so much fun. |
| 1:48.8 | I am just, honestly, I've been a Redmond fan for years, and I haven't been in. |
| 1:54.4 | We've actually never played together, so this will be our first time hanging and playing, looking forward to it. |
| 2:00.0 | And anyways, that's enough about what I got going on |
| 2:03.4 | let's get to this podcast without further ado the season finale Brad pace hey you guys know about |
| 2:13.3 | distro kid yet if you are an artist musician somebody who's trying to get your music on |
| 2:18.7 | spotify apple music all of those things distro kid is a digital distributor that can get your |
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