Joseph Hudak
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US country star Brad Paisley performs in front of destroyed Russian military equipment at the Mikhailovsky Square in Kyiv on April 12, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP/Getty Images When Brad Paisley released “Same Here,” his anthem of solidarity with the people of Ukraine, in 2023, he watched it connect with his listeners across the board. But then, something peculiar happened: The song, which featured a recording of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, started to be seen as polarizing and criticisms popped up online.
Paisley says a Russian bot campaign was to blame.
“When it came out, the response was 98 percent positive, based on what my web guy was tracking,” he tells Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast. “[Ukraine] had their own web guys over there. They’re tracking and so are we. And then the Russian bots got ahold of it and we watched it flip to…90 percent negative. It was all incredibly believable avatars. But they could see the origins… It was people pretending to be Americans, or even bots pretending to be Americans, attacking in a way that seemed very believable.”
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Paisley wrote the song with frequent collaborator Lee Thomas Miller and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith shortly after the Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. It’s a song about celebrating similarities with those in other countries, no matter how far we may be separated physically or culturally. To drive the point home, he asked Zelensky if he’d appear in “Same Here.”
“We didn’t write it exactly about [the invasion], but in my mind, I remember thinking this conversation — this friend across the ocean, talking about how different are we? — would be really powerful if that conversation was captured on audio, and it was the leader of that country. And [Zelensky] was like, ‘Yeah, we’ll do that.’”
Paisley and Zelensky met for a 45-minute Zoom conversation and a portion of the recording of their meeting was added to “Same Here.” Then, in April 2023, he traveled to Ukraine with a delegation of U.S senators to visit Zelensky and the people of the country, and perform his song in Kyiv’s Saint Michael’s Square.
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“I feel very deeply about the struggle of that country to become us. I want them to become us in some ways. They want to be us,” he says. “They have elections, but they want to be free and clear of the bully.
“I’ve not felt, deep in my bones, as clear a feeling of like rooting for something as I have when they got attacked,” Paisley continues. “I got involved with a charity over there and they asked me to become a United24 ambassador…to spread the word. I didn’t know that would be the least bit polarizing.”
Not that the criticism or online attacks affected him.
“It didn’t bother me at all. You don’t do a song like that and be like, ‘But I want everyone to like it!’” Paisley says. “No, I did that because it’s how I feel. I don’t care. You don’t have to like that. Tacklebox is out — go listen to that.”
Paisley, who released his new collection of songs Tacklebox in July, appeared at the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony on Monday night to induct Taylor Swift into the institution. “This is somebody who has conquered the world and done it with songs,” he said of Swift. Paisley’s “Same Here” collaborator, Lee Thomas Miller, was also one of the inductees.
