Brad Paisley is, to start with the obvious, a very good guitar player. That still matters. He’s played his own solos through twenty-plus years of country radio, authored 21 of his 24 number-one singles, and earned three Grammy Awards and fourteen from the CMA. He’s been a Grand Ole Opry member since 2001. None of that is promotional copy — it’s just the record.
He brings the Truck Still Works World Tour to The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands on Thursday, October 8, 2026, showtime 7:30 PM.
The tour takes its name from his 2024 single on EMI Music, co-written with Chris DuBois, Will Bundy, Hunter Phelps, and Rodney Clawson. DuBois is the one to note: he co-wrote “Mud on the Tires” with Paisley back in 2003, and the team built “Truck Still Works” with deliberate echoes of that earlier record — similar guitar patterns, matching chord inversions tucked into the arrangement. Paisley described the intent plainly: “It’s no more complicated than the nostalgia of it. We all want to recapture certain aspects of life.” The song doesn’t resolve cleanly, which is the point — it stays in the ambiguity of wanting to go back without promising you can get there. MusicRow‘s Bob Oermann called it “warmly nostalgic and rhythm happy.” That’s about right.
Opening is Jake Worthington, who grew up in La Porte listening to his grandfather work through Ray Price, Merle Haggard, and George Jones from memory. He picked up a Gibson acoustic, built a voice wide enough to carry that material, and auditioned for The Voice in 2014 with Keith Whitley’s “Don’t Close Your Eyes.” He finished the season as runner-up on Blake Shelton’s team. He’s signed to Big Loud Texas now, with tracks including “Hell of a Highway,” “Don’t Think Twice,” and “Jonesin’,” the last cut alongside Ronnie Dunn and Jake Owen. For a kid from La Porte, opening a 16,500-seat amphitheater north of Houston is not a bad Thursday.
The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion sits in The Woodlands and draws a broad Houston-area crowd — the kind of outdoor room that puts sky overhead and lets the night do some of the work. Paisley knows how to fill a room that size. He was named CMA Entertainer of the Year in 2010, has accumulated more than 3.9 billion on-demand streams, and leads a tour that launched in May 2025 and has since run through Canada and across Europe. The October dates are the back end of a long road that still has room in it.
Tickets are available through Ticketmaster. Additional details and updates at woodlandscenter.org.