Brad Paisley has been palling around with William Shatner for more than two decades. The Star Trek actor made a memorable cameo in Paisley’s 2003 video for “Celebrity,” playing an acerbic Simon Cowell-like reality-show judge, and the pair have continued to collaborate in music videos. Most recently, they teamed up in the studio: Paisley co-produced Shatner’s new spoken-word album, Love & Other Mysteries. It’s a callback to Shatner’s 1968 LP The Transformed Man, and its cover art even nods to that beloved cult classic.
But, Paisley stresses, it’s not a joke. “It’s not gimmicky at all. He means everything he’s saying,” the country music singer-guitarist tells Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast. “Bill is so willing to be all things when it comes to being interesting. He’ doing a heavy-metal thing right now. He’s happy to attempt anything, and it’s an amazing lesson for all of us, at 95.”
Paisley first met Shatner through a mutual friend and was invited to one of Shatner’s Monday Night Football parties. He said he instantly encountered an inquisitive fellow creative. “I never dreamed I’d even meet Bill,” he says. “He was so much different than you imagined he’d be. He was so hungry to meet people…and understand other art forms. And he was immediately fascinated with country music.”
But Love & Other Mysteries, co-produced by Paisley and Luke Wooten and featuring musical arrangements by Paisley, Gordon Mote, and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, isn’t a country album. It’s a blend of various musical styles, over which Shatner recites his dissertations on life, romance, and growing old (or resisting to).
Paisley says Shatner phoned him up with the idea for the album and suggested it’d serve as a legacy statement. “He said he’d written some really important songs, and more importantly, a bit of a memoir,” Paisley says. “He said, ‘I want this to be my statement for where I am at for 95 years old.’”
In a special episode of Nashville Now recorded at Paisley’s home studio, he also speaks candidly about his song of solidarity with the people of Ukraine, “Same Here”; the opioid crisis in his native Appalachia; his opposition to a proposed Nashville data center; and his commitment to helping those in need with the Store, the charitable market he runs with wife Kimberly Williams-Paisley. He also lets us into how he wrote a buzzy new song for South Park, and shares his favorite memory of Dolly Parton. Watch the full episode below.
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by Deputy Editor, Head of Country Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Shania Twain, Shaboozey, Vince Gill, Lainey Wilson, Sheryl Crow, Ashley McBryde, Brothers Osborne, Midland, Maggie Rose, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Kings of Leon, Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, the Black Crowes, Braxton Keith, Carly Pearce, Amy Grant, Luke Grimes, Brandon Lake, Breland, Bryan Andrews, Noeline Hofmann, Adam Mac, Aaron Raitiere, Devon Gilfillian, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Michaela Anne, Ink, Ne-Yo, Rival Sons’ Jay Buchanan, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, Clever, Love on the Spectrum’s Tyler White, Willie Nelson scholar John Spong, and authors Marissa R. Moss, Josh Crutchmer, Mark Gray, and Jonathan Bernstein.
Liam Payne (left) and Harry Styles of One Direction onstage during the 2013 American Music Awards at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on Nov. 24, 2013
Harry Styles Finds the Right Words on Liam Payne Tribute Song
For the past seven weeks, Harry Styles has reserved two minutes at each of his Madison Square Garden shows to reflect on the last time he gathered this many people in this room. Four years have passed since he performed 15 record-breaking nights at the venue during his Love on Tour. Now, every night at the new Together, Together shows, which span 30 nights at MSG, he acknowledges that “a lot of life happened to me and landed on me in ways that maybe it hadn’t before.”
Styles doesn’t usually go into much more detail; he typically just describes those in-between years as “a great reminder for me of just how wonderful and beautiful, difficult and inspiring, and also how fragile a life can be.” He encourages the audience to look around at each other and celebrate the community they’ve built together. Then he dives into “Sign of the Times.” It happens every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday like clockwork. But when he delivered this speech on Friday, Oct. 16, there was a shift. It didn’t conclude in its usual way.
Instead, Styles turned his attention to the banner commemorating his 15 consecutive nights at the Garden in 2022. “It means a lot to be able to look up there at my name up there from the last tour,” he said. “There are so many people, friends and people that I’ve worked with, that I would’ve never been able to do this without.” Two years ago, he continued, he lost one of those pillars. Friday’s show fell on the same day as the second anniversary of the death of Liam Payne, a loss that time has not made it easier to acknowledge. “I’m sure a lot of you have been through something similar,” Styles said. “I hope you haven’t.”
A frequent assessment of Styles, both among his fans and those who’ve only encountered him at a distance, is that he often talks at length before getting to the point. He recognizes it himself on the Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally song “Coming Up Roses,” where he sings about fumbling his words. But recently, comments about his long-winded way of speaking have started to feel like purposeful misreadings. There are clear and carefully considered thoughts present between his starts and stops. Anyone truly listening will pick up on those threads.
Styles cut himself off a few times during his speech on Friday. He tried to talk for a second about looking after each other, and repeated his point about the banner and the people who’ve supported him. He never mentions Payne by name, instead referring to him as a friend, which somehow became a point of criticism from some fans. The context is clear enough. Still, he seems to know it’s a gamble to expect understanding, especially when the conversation grows more complex and personal.
After about a minute and a half, Styles figured it best to show us what he means rather than tell us. “I’m gonna sing a song I wrote two years ago for my friend,” he said before premiering “Wise Enough.” The sullen tribute to Payne settled the room into a cool near-silence, punctured by quiet gasps and muffled crying. It was beautiful, devastating, and deeply exposing to watch Styles share his grief with 20,000 people in the best, and maybe only, way he knows how.
Earlier this year, Styles told Zane Lowe about the acute dread surrounding the expected performance of his mourning. “Full transparency, even the idea of talking about it, I struggle with that a little bit. There was a period when he passed away where I really struggled with acknowledging how strange it is to have people own part of your grief, in a way,” he said. “I have such strong feelings around my friend passing away. And then suddenly being aware there’s maybe a desire from other people of you to convey that in some way, or it means you’re not feeling what you’re feeling.”
Artists often describe the act of sharing new music as a change in ownership, something that is no longer their own once it has been handed over to an audience. “Wise Enough” feels protected from this. It would be confounding to see Styles ever record and release it in any official capacity. The song is openhearted in a way that exposes deep scars, anxious in a way that worries and fidgets about time and how it passes, and inconsolable in a way that doesn’t make the futile attempt to fight through anger, regret, or sadness.
“I can tell you what it’s like to bury friends on Wednesday nights/Gather in a garden around the fire,” Styles sings in a particularly cutting verse on the song, which concludes with an honest admission: “I’m not wise enough to call for a conversation/And then back it up, right?/Like you’re in the sky.”
Celebrity doesn’t obscure grief. It doesn’t come with a script for what to say when someone is sorry for your loss, or when they recollect their own version of the person you knew. No one really has the right words for these moments. Over the weekend, fans debated whether “Wise Enough” is actually titled “What Is Enough?” Styles introduced the record so briskly it was hard to decipher. The question of adequacy feels similarly impossible to answer.
Grief is so plain in how universal it is, but so complex in how and when it chooses to present itself. It can be policed only as much as it can be predicted, which is to say barely at all. That Styles let us into his now yearslong search for some semblance of understanding — knowing how his words have been picked apart before for far lesser things — shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Styles never acknowledges that banner at MSG. It’s not for lack of gratitude — he cried when it was unveiled. But the point he has reiterated every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday since the end of August is that the achievement is something that must be shared because he couldn’t have done it alone. He talks about being on stage as if what happens in that room exists far beyond and outside of himself, something that endures even in his absence.
It’s true in a way. There’s muscle memory tied to the music. It’s in the spinning, dizzying way fans dance to “Satellite,” or the way they wildly kick their feet and make the building shake during “Kiwi,” a song he brought back to the set just for New York. It’s just like before, but still so different.
Friday night continued as usual after “Wise Enough.” Styles belted out “Sign of the Times” in the sobering way he always does, then “Aperture” let in a cathartic flood of strobing lights and pulsating beats. The emotional whiplash took physical form as fans consoled one another, holding out their hands to help up friends and strangers who crumbled to the floor at the conclusion of the tribute. Some were crushed by their memories of loving One Direction, and the care they hold in their hearts for Styles. Some were just as wrecked by their own personal losses.
A lot of life and loss can happen in four years, as Styles says each night. For some people who were at MSG on Friday, there are friends present in their memories from the last tour who are missing from the new ones they’re making. The lyric “You dance until you’re tired/No, you don’t, and now you never will/Will you?” surfaces their own devastation completely separate from what inspired Styles to sprawl those words on a page. How do you dance to “Aperture” — the beating heart of this show in its declaration that “we belong together” — after hearing something like that?
You take the hand of the friend or the stranger who pulled you from the ground and use it to lead each other back to the dance floor. When Styles talks about community and stresses the importance of caring for one another each night, he reminds everyone of the fragility of a moment, and urges them to cherish every second they get. To dance wildly and sing loudly and wrap their arms around each other. To hold tight to what’s here right now.
It’s all any of us have, so it has to be enough.