Paisley Hits All the Marks in Upbeat Set

Would you want to try to find anyone better suited all around for the role of young country star than Brad Paisley? Me neither.

Paisley, who headlined the House of Blues Anaheim on Monday, is handsome--not Brad Pitt or George Clooney gorgeous, but with everyday good looks and sufficient James Dean vulnerability to make women go weak in the knees.

He’s an effective singer--not George Jones or Merle Haggard masterful, but regular-guy honest.

He’s a solid songwriter--not Johnny Cash or Hank Williams deep, but consistently sincere and blessed with a powerful sense of how and where to use a punch line.

And he’s a first-rate guitarist--the one area where he could stand buckle-to-buckle with some of country’s biggest names.

Put it together and even with just two albums to his name, it’s not all that surprising that at just 29, the West Virginian has already been elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, charted a heap of country singles and transformed one, “He Didn’t Have to Be,” into a book that TBS plans to turn into a TV movie.

At the House of Blues, Paisley and his barbed-wire-sharp band did everything the way it would go in a well-scripted movie, hitting all their marks without ever leaving the feeling that any of their words or emotions had to be memorized before he stepped on stage.

The 80-minute show encompassed the hits and a few surprises, including a witty new song about a guy whose fatal flaw is his love of cigars.

Besides being a country fan’s dream, Paisley is a radio programmer’s dream because nearly all his songs display the craft of a seasoned writer, but generally don’t violate the commandment “Thou shalt not bring thy listener down.”

Ballads such as “We Danced” and “Two People Fell in Love” strum on the heartstrings mightily, but they’d be harder to take were it not for the dollops of humor that brighten such near-novelty numbers as “I’m Gonna Miss Her” and “Me Neither,” which show lessons learned from Roger Miller.

In fact, his effort to maintain an overwhelmingly up tone is probably the reason he omitted Darrell Scott’s “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” one of the high points of his latest album, “Part II,” and one of the few songs in his repertoire whose beauty is more than skin deep.

L.A.-based roots-country quintet Hank Floyd opened with a scrappy, marginally in-tune set longer on good intentions than inspired execution in paying admirable homage to such mavericks as Gram Parsons and Neil Young.