Brad Paisley is a sly performer.
While he superficially adheres to the contours of contemporary country stardom -- with witty yet easily digestible ditties about drinking, loving , and fishing -- he still manages to sneak brains, heart , and courage onto the stage he so comfortably calls home.
Saturday night at the Tweeter Center, the West Virginia native proved that he is the poster boy for new millennium country, effortlessly combining age-old tradition with a new age sensibility.
He sang lovingly about getting dirty on "Mud on the Tires" and joked about ditching his wife to fish on "I'm Gonna Miss Her" while working an ultra-modern stage that twinkled and shone with neat geometric rows of multi colored lights and sleek LCD screens.
A rip-snorting instrumental -- a rare commodity at mainstream country concerts -- filled with his impressively nimble jazz and rock - tinged fretwork, was jazzed up by zippy animation -- also hand-made by Paisley.
His top-notch six-piece band worked up a down-home fervor complete with fleet banjo picking , and frothy fiddles in service of songs like the new "Online" -- which skewers the embellished images of some denizens of the World Wide Web-- and "I'm Still a Guy" which good-naturedly poked fun at the metrosexualization of American men.
A terrific acoustic set was likewise digitally enhanced. The gloriously solemn, dark-side-of-drinking weeper "Whiskey Lullaby" found album duet partner Alison Krauss making a pre-recorded yet still winsome appearance. And the gospel-flavored "When I Get Where I'm Going" was accompanied by images of those who've passed on, including Johnny Cash.
Paisley closed with a nod to the Man in Black with a propulsive cover of "Folsom Prison Blues" that made clear no matter how techno-savvy we become, country music's bedrock is still solid.
Austin's Jack Ingram continues to make a bumpy transition to Nashville-approved success. The rangy blonde is undeniably charismatic, but recent hits, like the better-than-the-original-but-that's-not-saying-much cover of Hinder's knucklehead arena ballad "Lips of an Angel," suffer drastically by comparison to his good stuff. Saturday night, songs like "Measure of a Man" and "Make a Wish (Coming Home Again)" fell into the latter category as Ingram took familiar concepts down new paths.
The night's biggest revelation was "American Idol" runner-up Kellie Pickler. The former drive-in waitress and Simon Cowell's favorite "naughty little minx" has clearly left her roller skates and the Fox talent show behind. The 19-year-old's performance was sassy and soulful, and though she's still finding her legs onstage, the audience found theirs, giving her a standing ovation for her vulnerable motherless child piano ballad "I Wonder."
