Brad Paisley Reveals What Country Stars Thought of His ‘Crushin’ It’ Cartoon
When notorious prankster Brad Paisley released his hand-drawn, country-stars-as-super-heroes video for his new single "Crushin' It," sides were splitting and eyes were rolling all over the country music world. And that's just what he was hoping for.
In an interview with reporters on Wednesday (May 20), Paisley filled in the blanks on how he came up with the wacky idea, and how his country star friends really reacted when they first saw it.
He says he spent "three to four hours a day for a couple of weeks" drawing the cartoons, and didn't let the targets of his artistic vision, like Florida Georgia Line and Keith Urban, know about it until it was almost finished.
"I gave them a heads up, but I wouldn't have listened to anything they said," Paisley reveals with a chuckle. "I was trying to do it to where everybody would laugh. My goal was that anybody in it would go, 'That's really funny,' as opposed to, 'I hate you.'"
As for how he came up with each star's cartoon likeness, the good-natured singer and guitar slinger started with the obvious stuff, and then went for broke.
"There have to be identifiable traits for it to be funny," he shares. "It's like 'How do you capture Luke (Bryan)?' With Luke, it's the teeth. Once I got that smile, that's Luke Bryan. With Blake (Shelton), it's just goofy. Just draw goofy. Drawing these people was really fun, and also knowing that they didn't know I was doing that. Then one by one, I texted them their photos."
Paisley admits getting his friends' reactions was the best part, especially since there was such a huge range of responses.
"The Florida Georgia Line one, I had settled on what that was and I saw them at the ACMs and was like, 'You're not gonna believe what I'm doing,'" he said. "They're like 'What?' I told them I was drawing a cartoon and they were like, 'That sounds awesome!' I said, 'Yeah, here's you,' and they went nuts. They hit the floor and were like, 'You're kidding me, that's perfect.' I said 'The real question is what two names go on the front of the T-shirts, like 'Bevis and Butt-head,' and it was 'Cash' and 'Bieber' to me. The dichotomy and ridiculousness of that was just perfect."
"There were some hilarious exchanges," Paisley continues. "The text I sent to Keith Urban was like, 'You want a laugh?' and he was like 'Sure.' So I sent him this picture and he was like 'Is that an emoji app?' I was like, 'No, that's you and I drew it!' He's like 'Oh. Why? You're just sitting around drawing pictures of me?' And I was like 'No, no, I'm doing a ... nevermind. You'll see."
"And for Darius (Rucker) I just wrote, 'Hey Darius, I'm drawing a cartoon of everybody. If you could have super powers what would you want?' And he just wrote back, 'Flight and super strength, thanks.'"
In the end, Paisley shares that he's extremely happy with how the project turned out and how everyone seems to appreciate his satirical sense of humor. He figured it came out much better than his original idea ...
"I only did it because we had a video idea that was entirely too elaborate to ever probably pull off," he said. "It was breaking Guinness World Records and dropping huge things on big beer cans, and in retrospect it would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and I don't know that we'd be talking about it like this in a fun way."
Adds the star, "And this one cost $906."
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