He's the cowboy-hat guy singing about mud on the tires of his pickup truck — and the country star who got on a video call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to fund war rebuilding efforts. Brad Paisley's road from West Virginia child prodigy to modern country music statesman shatters every comfortable stereotype the genre built around him.

Paisley engineered his rise like few artists in Nashville history: a grueling teenage apprenticeship on stage, a Belmont business degree for leverage, and a debut that bypassed the struggling-artist years entirely. Then, with the machinery built, he started outgrowing it — confronting painful racial history, hometown pharmaceutical giants, and the box country music drew for him.

• At 13 he fronted Brad Paisley and the C Notes, a band of grown men twice his age

• His 1999 ...