Brad’s Duet Pitch To Carrie

Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood are friends and labelmates.  The two recorded a duet for Brad’s 5th album several years ago.  But their partnership clicked while co-hosting the CMA Awards.  A couple months ago, Brad was just about ready to turn in his latest album, when he had an idea for a new Carrie duet.  Brad told Country Countdown USA’s Lon Helton: “The album needed one of those classic Conway & Loretta duets, like ‘After the Fire Is Gone,’ and I thought Carrie was perfect.  I called her and I started singing it to her on the phone.  And all I really had was the chorus. I sang it to her again, and she came in with the line ‘Remind me,’ and I knew it was gonna be good.  So I asked, ‘Are you in on that?’ She goes, ‘Get it done and we’ll see.’  ‘I’ll get it done.'”

LISTEN: 11-22 Brad6

One piece of trivia is the day she recorded her part of the duet was also the day jer husband, hockey star Mike Fisher, was traded from Ottowa to Nashville.  Which meant they could both live together in Music City.  Brad recalls, “She lands, comes over to the house, and she looks shell-shocked, she had no idea that was a possibility, and she says, ‘I guess I’ll stay here, he comes in tomorrow.'”

We later spoke with Brad further about why he felt so strongly about this duet, and why he was willing to delay the release of his album in order to include it.  Brad said, “It was written to fill the gap I felt was on the album.  I didn’t think we had everything we needed, and it had to do with romance.  I tried to describe it to my manager when I made him go in to the label and beg them for more time.  I kept describing it as romantic, and it ended up this is what I needed to write.  Every love song I wrote on this album sounded like less inspiring than…for me.  So I didn’t write a love ballad on this album.  As we sat down to write, my co-writer had a title “I Wish You Would Remind Me Of That,” and that’s when I started thinking of this as a duet.  There are two inspirations, the old country conversation song, and then in a modern sense, people like Emenem, Kanye West, and Black Eyed Peas will take a female singing some lyrics.  They sing a refrain, this part that’s from the woman’s perspective, and I thought it was an untapped thing we should try in this format.  So I started singing it and came up with that chorus, where it goes up the octave, and called Carrie the next morning.  She was my first choice.”

One other piece of trivia: Brad was writing with Sheryl Crow the next day after he wrote it, and asked her to sing Carrie’s part.  So Sheryl sort of did the demo for Carrie.

One question Lon asked that didn’t make it into the radio show: So is it possible than the first time we hear you and Carrie sing this together might be on the CMA Awards in November?  “You never know.  That certainly makes sense.  Thanks Lon for the idea!”

Tags: Brad, carrie

Category: CO-HOST, NEWS