Throwback Thursday: Brad Paisley & Alison Krauss, ‘Whiskey Lullaby’
Relive one of the greatest country songs of all time.
Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly series showcasing an album, single, music video or performance of a bygone era and its personal and/or cultural significance.
Several months ago, while stuck in a YouTube vortex, I came across Brad Paisley and Alison Kruass‘ devastating “Whiskey Lullaby,” which I had seen countless times before as a teenager. But what struck me the most now was the comments section ⎯⎯ I should have known better. You never read the comments section. “I was married to a vet, long time ago! He has passed now, but I cannot understand how anyone could do that to someone they love!” wrote one user. “Her fault tbh, cheating on your significant other is inexcusable. If you love someone through sickness and health, you don’t go behind their back and betray them,” spouted another. And a third rose a toast, of sorts, saying, “Cheers to all of us who’ve tried so hard to give our heart away only to get it stomped on. And to hell with the cowards who didn’t have the backbone to treat us right.”
Cheating is never excusable, but mistakes only make you human. The lack of compassion is severe and swift. Shifting through still other comments, many older users offered up their own brushes with infidelity and unquenched heartache. “The same thing happened to me [in] 1969, but I lived over it to tell the tale. [I’m ] 73 years old now,” shares Herschel French. “Totally hits home for me, I came home from Iraq to the same thing,” revealed one more. Yet another user wrote of the darkness that haunted his soul, “I wanted to put that bottle to my head and pull the trigger, more times than I can count…”
It’s a kind of anguish that time may or may not be able to mend. As is the case with this man, played by Rick Schroder (NYBD Blue, 24, Lonesome Dove), time only seems merciless and to exacerbate the memories. He becomes so lost in the ghost of her that he turns to whiskey to drown out the noise. In the music video, which Schroder also directed, he returns home from World World II to discover his wife, portrayed by Marisa Petroro (Drop Dead Diva, Dexter), having an affair. The broken heart sends him into a never-ending spiral ⎯⎯ “until the night he put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger / And finally drank away her memory,” Paisley mourns.
The weight of guilt pays it forward, much like the circle of life. Petroro’s performance, of a woman both grieving and blaming herself for what ultimately transpired, is flooded with the kind of pain from which you can’t come back. “For years and years, she tried to hide the whiskey on her breath / She finally drank her pain away a little at a time / But she never could get drunk enough to get him off her mind…” Krauss sings, her reedy, clear voice driving the knife even deeper. The troubled woman then takes her own life, too, freeing herself from his grasp, perhaps reuniting in the afterlife. Forgiveness is a hard pill to swallow, but it’s far and away a better option than such desperation.
“Whiskey Lullaby,” which appears on Paisley’s 2003 album Mud on the Tires, is written by Bill Anderson and Jon Randall, who had just divorced singer Lorrie Morgan before writing the weepy ballad. He had also lost is writing and record deals within a few days. Talk about a punch to the head. Whiskey was his agent, then, seemingly washing his heart and mind clean. Of course, that was short-lived, and the story goes: he crashed a friend’s couch for a few weeks, later sobering up. He turned to his friend and apologized, “Man, I’m sorry for the way I’ve acted the last couple of weeks.” His friend replied, “That’s alright, Jon; I’ve put the bottle to my head and pulled the trigger a few times in my life.”
That line (“put the bottle to my head and pulled the trigger”) became the spark Randall needed, so he released his anger and sorrow and grief in a song during a session with legend Bill Anderson. “It wasn’t exactly like people were running up and down Music Row looking for double suicide drinking songs,” Anderson quipped years later. “In fact, I had to pretty much twist Jon’s arm to even get him to come in and cut a demo on it. This was in 2000. The song just kind of laid there for a while, and then we got word one day that it had been put on hold.”
Dixie Chicks had put it on hold.
But around the same time, Natalie Maines’ comments overseas about then-President George W. Bush all but ended their mainstream country career (thanks, country radio, that boycott worked wonders!). The song sat for awhile, still on hold, but Paisley’s publisher over at Sea Gayle Music pulled out a copy from her desk and let him listen to it. When things turned further south for the Chicks, Paisley jumped at the opportunity but wanted to expanded the song as a duet with a woman. “We wrote it for one person to sing all the way through and tell the story. I said, ‘Wow, that’s a pretty cool idea. Who are you thinking about?’ [Brad] said, ‘There’s only two people I think that could do it. Either Alison Krauss or Dolly Parton,'” recalls Anderson. “So, I’m walking around the house, saying, ‘Oh, I hope they can work it out, please, with somebody.’ A few days later, I got word that Alison’s company and Brad’s company had worked things out.”
“Whiskey Lullaby” is a prime example of the stars aligning perfectly, and in Paisley’s and Krauss’ very capable hands, we’ve got one of the most outstanding songs in country history. It went on to snag the CMA Song of the Year in 2005, beating out Paisley’s own “Alcohol,” Toby Keith’s “As Good As I Once Was,” Rascal Flatts’ “Bless the Broken Road,” Lee Ann Womack’s “I May Hate Myself in the Morning” and Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman.”
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