Brad Paisley Affected, Not Devastated, by Flood

The flood that submerged significant parts of Nashville last week was extraordinarily tough on lots of people. Many — including Brad Paisley, who headlines a GAC benefit concert this weekend — are taking stock and already in rebuilding mode.


More than 20 people lost their lives in the deluge; many more lost their houses. So Brad recognizes that even if his losses were significant, they pale in comparison to others’ misfortune.

His biggest setback came when SoundCheck, a storage facility near the Cumberland River, was flooded. He lost most of his guitars and some of the staging he intended to use on his upcoming H2O Tour. Many of the guitars were custom-built models that he’d grown accustomed to using in specific settings. Now he’ll be hitting the stage in front of thousands of people playing guitars that feel unfamiliar — or, at least, unfamiliar on a specific song.

“My most special relationship is with that old ‘68 Tele, because it was on my first record,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “That’s the one that’s me. It’s like a good horse or something. That one, thank goodness, was at home. And I can play that all night if I have to. But we have to switch guitars — when you’re outdoors, they go out of tune. We work very hard to get it to sound right every night.”

Brad’s biggest fans likely know he’s been using a bulldozer to do some major landscaping on his property for several years. His house weathered the storms that created Nashville’s floods, but he got to see what 13 inches of rain can do firsthand.

"There was a river going by my house all of a sudden,” he said. “We don’t have any rivers out here. We’re up on a hill, thankfully. We lost trees. We have a pond that I’m in the middle of building that wasn’t ready to fill yet, but the dam was almost done. It was going to be four acres. It was dry as a bone on Friday night. By Saturday night, which was only halfway through the storm, it was full. It filled up a four-acre pond! And then by Sunday it had been running over the entire night. In our garage, we had four inches of water, but it wasn’t any big deal.”