It’s about an eight-hour drive from Nashville to Glen Dale, West Virginia.

No easy feat for a college kid. But when Brad Paisley thinks about Thanksgiving, that’s what he remembers: the first trips back home.

“I remember when I first moved to Nashville. I was at Belmont [University], and I would drive up to West Virginia to see the family, and I hadn’t seen them usually since August," Paisley said in a recent radio interview.

"That’s really what Thanksgiving is about. I think it’s more common for people to go back to where they’re from on that holiday than it is even on Christmas."

For him, he said, those trips always kept him grounded.

But now that he has a family of his own, he knows that they need to feel grounded, too. So he’s learning “not to leave.”

“I remember the first year I didn’t leave," he said. "And if you have the kids first in the family, you're set, because that’s where the tradition starts.

Paisley and his wife Kimberly Williams-Paisley still have about nine more Thanksgivings before their oldest son Huck will likely go away to college, and then their house near Nashville will become the one he comes home to.