ALBUM REVIEW: Paisley Field’s ‘Are U Mad At Me’ is an Instant Country Classic
Paisley Fields immerses the listener in a delightful frenzy from the very jump on his instant classic Are U Mad At Me. Fields takes country music’s key ingredients – nostalgia, authenticity, the mundane indignities of life – and throws them in a blender, producing ten songs that set
Black News 
Paisley Fields immerses the listener in a delightful frenzy from the very jump on his instant classic Are U Mad At Me. Fields takes country music’s key ingredients – nostalgia, authenticity, the mundane indignities of life – and throws them in a blender, producing ten songs that set the head spinning, heart aching, and mouth bitterly smirking…and toe along to frenetic hyperpop beats. Strain an ear a bit, and you’ll hear the echoes of Patrick Haggerty, queer country’s self-described original “screaming Marxist bitch.”
The album screeches from zero to sixty with “parTy girl,” a dizzying portrait of the piano bar’s version of a honky-tonk angel whose charms are beginning to wear off. The one-two punch of this character portrait with "Straight Panic Defense” is a sharp wakeup call: Paisley’s previous work always had some joke songs, but none of them were delivered with such a snarl. The song could have tumbled out of a biker bar’s juke box in the ‘70s, somewhere between Merle and the Ramones, the song barrels through descriptions of violence often deployed against queer people – and flips them to punch up, illustrating the ridiculous nature of trans panic.
