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Kenny Chesney Biography
"This album, I hope moves
me closer
to where I'd like to be --
someone who speaks honestly about the stuff these moments, these simple
moments that define our lives, are made of.
To me, that's important as a writer -- and an artist.
'No Shoes' was a picture of where I was in my life at that time…
and there was wrenching stuff,
but I'd like to think I'm pretty much an open, if emotional, book."
By writing and singing songs
that reflected his own life, Kenny Chesney found himself a mirror that
reflected the joys, heartaches, thrills, spills and lost nights of young
fresh-faced America. His is a world of first kisses, first loves, first
broken hearts and the unfurling of lives that are transitioning from
school to the real world. That veracity of burgeoning adulthood found its
roots on his nearly quadruple platinum No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems -
and it offers a newfound maturity to When The Sun Goes Down .
Anyone who's passionate about
music is emotional," says the reigning Academy of Country Music Top
Male Vocalist of the Year. "I'm at peace with where I am in my life.
I like to be serious; I read a lot and I think a lot - though people might
not realize that. But to be whole, you need a release. You need to get
laid-back, too, to have fun…
"With No Shoes , I think we did that… had fun and looked at some
pretty rough emotions. I'd like to think I'm serious enough to do a song
like 'Some People Change' or 'When I Think About Leaving,' but am also the
kind of guy who'd hangout in the islands with Unkle Kracker, the way 'When
The Sun Goes Down' is. That's how people really are: both! They need and
want that.
"My audience is smart. They are real people who lead whole lives -
want to party on the weekend, feel free, but also feel that deep love,
raise a family. I know that, because I know them, because I am them
ultimately."
Kenny Chesney, born and raised in tiny Luttrell, Tennessee, is as typical
as they come. Perhaps the slowest receiver in the history of high school
football, but he made the team. He loved some girls. He had some laughs.
He went to college. He found a dream. And then he hung on with everything
he had.
When The Sun Goes Down in a lot of ways is the celebration of living life,
seeking love and not being afraid to dream. With the man whose 2003
concert tour was bested only by Bruce Springsteen and the Dave Matthews
Band decides to take on life, you can count on the music to capture the
how-it-is. Whether it's the poignant "There Goes My Life," which
reveals how life's surprising tragedies are often life's real reasons for
living, the pensive harvest of the bitter sweetness of soul searching and
the passage of life "Old Blue Chair" or the percolating title
track that celebrates island revelry with special guest Unkle Kracker,
these are the phases and stages of real life fully inhabited.
Indeed, Chesney's own surging
midtempo "I Go Back" is a mission statement about music's
ability to be more than the soundtrack for one's life - but a companion
that is as much a part of defining the moments as the place or what's
said. "That song is totally about my life and how I grew up…and the
way certain songs just put you in the moment, when it's happening and
years later when they catch you off guard, transporting you again.
"David Farmer, my road manager, and I got in his truck and drove to
Myrtle Beachthe day we graduated… the smell of an old gym floor puts me
right back in the bleachers, I can still see that special girl that I
kissed… and my really good friend who'd moved away to Jacksonville who
got killed in a car wreck when hewas 17….there are songs that just are
those people, places, times. That's what' I Go Back' is all about… and
what I'd love to think this music might be on some level for anyone
listening to it."
The potency of life is what it's all about. Chesney, who wrote four of Sun
's 11 songs, and the currents that carry you from moment to moment. When
he released No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems , he was a young man on the
verge - running from a heartbreak, trying to find his balance and make his
place in the world.
In the three years since, Kenny Chesney has arrived - and stayed the same.
"I still dream," admits the first man to play the University of
Tennessee's high temple of college football Neyland Stadium since Michael
Jackson brought his record-breaking Victory Tour to Knoxville.
"Truthfully… I'm still dreaming the same dream I was when I was
going to that music store in Johnson City to rent sound gear that I loaded
into my truck - to drive an hour and a half to Galax, Virginia and play
'til two in the morning.
"Then I'd drive back,
sleep in my truck 'til the music store opened back up, take the stuff back
in and go to McDonalds to get something to eat so I could get to class.
That's how music burned inside me, how impossible that dream was- and what
you start to realize is no matter where you are, there's always so much
more to accomplish…"
With the 2002 Billboard Country Single of the Year - his seven week #1
"The Good Stuff," which also won the Academy of Country Music's
Top Single of the Year at their 2003 ACM Awards - in his back pocket, the
friendship and respect of artists like Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp
and Kid Rock, the biggest fan-drawing country concert tour of 2003, it
would seem that there's not much left for the soft-talking
singer/songwriter from East Tennessee to burn for. But that would to miss
the fire inside Kenny Chesney.
"When the Margaritas 'n' Senoritas Tour ended and I went to the
islands for what was my first real time off in three years, it was a
strange feeling," he confesses. "Suddenly, the rhythm of the
road had receded… the fans, who're my friends in so many ways, were
gone… and it was just me and the sound in my head. You know, it's a
whole other way to live, and it gets you to thinking about what you're
doing - and why.
"One day I got up and went out into the middle of the water, and
listened to No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems all the way through - just
took it in, thought about what it meant to me then. I knew that guy who
made that record, but inthe years since it had come out, I'd evolved so
much as a person, had seen and learned so much about myself and life and
other people. I'm proud of my last record, the way I put so much of myself
out there - and I knew what we had to do with When The Sun Goes Down -
paint the same picture of where I am now.
"I'm not running any
more… I'm taking life as it comes. I'm happier than I've ever been; I'm
more creative and learning how to write better songs - to take an emotion
and make it mean something, take other people into the feelings. But I
also love to have fun. We've had a lot of it over the past year. I think
When The Sun Goes Down captures both sides of me, that way."
Certainly fun defines the euphoric "Keg In The Closet" - another
Chesney original - captures the wild nights of fraternity row where the
freedom to chase the night, to find out who you are and how much fun you
can have is a triumph of celebrating the moment with its "dog named
Bocephus" and "going to class just to pass the time" and
the tropicali "When The Sun Goes Down," which is all about the
release of kicking back in a place where everything is sunny and bright
and everyone wants to know your name.
"I meet a lot of characters in the islands, people who're running…
who're happier on a fishing boat than they are back home. When I first got
down there, I don't know if I was running from a real bad heartbreak or
running to something I thought would make me feel better. But since I've
been spending time in the Caribbean, I've come to realize that I've got
nothing to run from.
"I love it back home. I love where I'm from. I love everything about
this life- even the getting hurt, because there's so much you learn. It's
all part of it. So when we set out to make this record, that was where the
compass was pointing: to the truth that you should get waist deep and feel
all of it, savor every moment, the bitter and the sweet, cause in all of
that - that's where your life is."
That balance is in evidence in
the yearning song of a perfect moment that is destined to be lost like sea
foam, but that's burned forever in one's soul "Anything But
Mine," that's the best Springsteen song the Boss didn't write, and
the half-spoken/half-sung "When I Think About Leaving," with the
weighing of the reasons to stay in a moment of frustration that could
spark into a decision that would deny everything that matters.
"Too many people don't fight for the things in their life that really
matter. They say 'Oh, we grew apart…' and maybe that's just laziness and
not paying attention. When you lose something, like I did, it makes you
wake up and realize…'
There is one perfect country song of loss and the wreckage of burned out
hearts that is the "Mis'ry and Gin"-invoking waltz "Being
Drunk's A Lot Like Loving You." As he says of the song that was
started years ago on a notepad he'd never thrown out from one particularly
pounding morning after, "I woke up, broken hearted and hung over, saw
her picture and actually told it 'Being drunk's a lot like loving you…'
because when you're drunk or heartbroken, the pain never seems to go away.
You can escape for a little bit, but it always comes back, sometimes even
worse.
"The thing about writing the lyrics first is they tell you what the
song needs to be… And the thing about country music, it is about those
kinds of moments and emotions. So, being that country as someone said to
me who'd heard it, well, look where I'm from! I grew up from where Roy
Acuff's from, and Dolly Parton, Don Gibson, Dean Dillon. Chet Atkins is
from my hometown!
"Where I'm from, no
matter what you listen to, you talk country, you think country, you are
country. Your family's country. The food on your table's country. The
church you go to on Sunday morning's country… And that's a good thing.
It means something. It stands for something. And, truly, when you scrape
it all away, that is who I am. So that'll always be the place I come back
to."
The people from back when continue to dot his life and populate his songs.
With his three best friends from childhood involved in the top levels of
his touring reality, a production crew anchored by the people who were
there from the beginning and an emergent manager who was more young
dreamer who believed and realized both of their dreams when no one else
saw it, Kenny Chesney is about keeping these people close by. When you
listen to "The Woman With You," a song empowering the girls who
could decided that it's more about their family - a decision many'd decry
as a cop-out -- Chesney can put a name and a face on it.
"Candy Holt is hands down the smartest person I know," he says
flatly. "She could've run a bank, taken on the Supreme Court… and
back when we were in college, we ALL knew it. Then she met Tim, and love
happened, and all that fell out the window. She never even thinks about
all the stuff that could've been, because she loves her life. When I heard
this song, I thought of her - and all the girls out therewith big dreams
and more talent -- who found something that completed them that wasn't all
that, but so much more."
The transformative power of so much more… especially as it exists in the
every day, in real lives. If any star on Nashville's Music Row is
testament to that, it's Kenny Chesney, the 5'6" Acuff/Rose developing
songwriter, player-for-tips and parker-of-cars who let the power of a
dream carry him to the greatest heights of stardom. But the man People
hailed as "The Sexiest Country Singer Alive" knows
transformation is so much more than scaling the heights and quantifiable
accomplishments.
Take "Some People
Change," a song about jettisoning racism and overcoming addiction.
"Not what people might expect from me," acknowledges Chesney
with a laugh. "What people don't realize is that that sort of thing
is ingrained, it's a way of thinking people are raised with… We had a
father like that back when I was in high school, and I remember the shame
we all felt when he made a big deal about a black friend of ours at a
football team party we had at their house.
"And in that moment, our friend did the bravest thing I'd ever seen
anyone do: he told his Dad our friend wasn't leaving. We all felt the way
our friend did… we all hated that our black friend might've wondered if
we all felt like the father in that moment, because that's how people are
raised. When he stood up for that kid, he stood up for us - and that was a
lesson I never forgot.
"Just like watching a couple real good friends battling addictions.
It's inspiring to watch people have the courage to go through hell and
what frightens them to get better. Those are the people with real
courage… and they're everywhere if you'll look. See them for what they
are, for what they do and you'd be shocked at how inspiring it can be no
matter where you are in your life."
Where you are in your life… For Kenny Chesney, life is a pretty sweet
place to be. It's about the tides of the human heart, the kindness that
lies inside people, the thrill of connecting with the fans, the way people
can see themselves in his songs and gain insight, context or just a reason
to kick up their heels. When it all comes down to it, you can weep, you
can revel, you can feel the entire gamut -- and it's always the sweetest
When The Sun Goes Down.
Kenny Chesney Links
Kenny
Chesney's Official Website |
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