Brad Paisley isn’t going to be the one to spill all the details about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce‘s all-star July 3 wedding at New York’s Madison Square Garden. But the 53-year-old country icon did recently talk to the Associated Press about the lavish affair he felt lucky, and honored, to be invited to.
“They were very clear with the invite,” Paisley told the AP. “And I took this personally when I got the invite, because in the invite it said, ‘If you’re getting this, you mean a lot to us.’” Paisley has a long friendship with Swift that dates back to him inviting a then-17-year-old Taylor to be the opening act on his 2007 Bonfires & Amplifiers tour, an outing that helped her get a foothold in Nashville.
And, because he knows Swift and can appreciate her legendary attention to detail, Paisley said he had fun with the “cat-and-mouse game” of trying to suss out clues about the hush-hush wedding’s details as the date drew nearer. “[They were like], ‘We can tell you roughly where it’s going to be. We’re not going to say what building, and here’s the date, and if you’re in, we’ll tell you more.’ And I went to my wife and said, ‘You wanna go?’ And she said, ‘Absolutely! We got to be there,’” Paisley said of himself and his wife, Kimberly Williams-Paisley.
Despite the hoopla, the cloak-and-dagger nature of the watermarked invitations and the Fort Knox-like security, Paisley said that the whole affair was actually “one of the least pretentious weddings I’ve ever seen or ever will see … It meant a lot to be [there]. It was kind of a big ‘thank you’ from her to invite us.”
In another testament to their long friendship, Swift and Kelce made a “transformative” gift to The Store, Paisley’s nonprofit that helps families experiencing food insecurity, as part of their $26 million in donations to a variety of charitable organizations ahead of the wedding.
Paisley was in good A-list company at the MSG affair, where the hundreds of other guests reportedly included Miranda Lambert, Maren Morris, Jennifer Lopez, Bradley Cooper, Lena Dunham, Ed Sheeran, Gigi Hadid, Kelsea Ballerini, the Haim sisters, Jason Sudeikis and more, with comedian/actor Adam Sandler officiating the ceremony.
