Brad Paisley took his new single, “No I in Beer,” to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon this week, performing the upbeat drinking song from his home while teaming up with his band members, who were also at their homes but connected with Paisley through the magic of video chatting. Paisley performed from what appears to be his home studio, wearing his signature cowboy hat and a Tonight Show t-shirt as he strummed a guitar, a spare hat sitting nearby on a keyboard.
The 47-year-old was accompanied by his various band members including a drummer, a guitar player, a bass player, a slide guitar player, a mandolin player and a banjo player, some of whom joined Paisley on harmonies. “Two I’s in Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, @fallontonight. But…No I in Beer,” Paisley joked on Instagram. “Thanks Jmmy.” Paisley first debuted “No I in Beer” last month, though he originally wrote it two years ago with co-writer Kelley Loveless and tweaked it just slightly before its release.
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“It’s crazy as I look around at life right now how everybody is just doing what they can to get through this,” Paisley said at the time of the song’s release. “And one of the things that’s so crazy are these drinking parties that people are having from their homes using technology to be together any way that they can… it’s like so strange in such a way that we are connected in a way that we’ve never been and one of the common denominators is alcohol. The fact that beer sales, alcohol sales are up, like, I hear, like 60 percent or something ridiculous,” he continued. “And I get it. It’s like people are utilizing this time to connect with people and to feel sort of solidarity as human beings in the face of this pandemic.”
During the coronavirus pandemic, Paisley has been connecting with fans by crashing their Zoom calls, and he told Hoda Kotb on the Today show that those interactions inspired him to release the song. “It’s funny, I wrote the bulk of this song in 2018 and performed it a few times to rousing ovations from the drinking crowd in the back,” he joked, “but it wasn’t until this thing happened that we ended up looking around and it’s like, ‘This is how people are getting through it. They’re having these drinking parties and people are sitting around, they’re drinking and talking.’ It reminds me of college, only it’s everybody’s at home in their pajamas. We released this because it’s strangely unifying, the concept of it.”
