Image Credit: Kevin Mazur/WireImage

Today, the internet is abuzz over a provocative new track from Brad Paisley and LL Cool J (yes, like Nelly and Tim McGraw before them, they recorded a duet) called “Accidental Racist,” which appears on Paisley’s ninth studio album Wheelhouse, available tomorrow.

The song covers Paisley’s struggle to deal with race issues as a white man in the South, who feels like people are “walking on eggshells” whenever the subject comes up. The lyrics describe him (or at least the character he’s playing) walking into a coffee shop wearing a shirt that has a confederate flag on it. Paisley sings, “[I'm] just a proud rebel son with an ‘ol can of worms/Lookin’ like I got a lot to learn.” LL Cool J eventually answers Paisley’s verse with a rap of his own. “If you don’t judge my do-rag… I won’t judge your red flag,” the recent Grammy host says. “If you don’t judge my gold chains… I’ll forget the iron chains,” he continues.

When the earnestly delivered song floated through the EW office a few weeks ago, we knew it was destined to cause a ruckus. So we asked Paisley to share his motivation for recording “Accidental Racist” as part of print-edition feature on the stories behind some of his biggest career hits. An online version of that article was supposed to run tomorrow, but since everyone is talking about “Accidental Racist” now, the song merited its own post.

Here’s Paisley (with very light edits, just for clarity) on why he made “Accidental Racist”:

“At this point, after all these albums and all these hits, I have no interest in phoning it in, and I think that [the song] comes from an honest place in both cases, and that’s why it’s on there and why I’m so proud of it. This isn’t a stunt. This isn’t something that I just came up with just to be sort of shocking or anything like that. I knew it would be, but I’m sort of doing it in spite of that, really. READ FULL STORY »