Kenny Chesney
It was clear to me, as soon as I got my footing as editor of CMA Close Up, that Kenny Chesney didn’t fit any of the stereotypes that dominated country music. He wasn’t a truck-drivin’ dude. Nor was he a slick vestige of the countrypolitan era. Or a red-dirt Okie, a Bakersfield honky-tonker or an alt-country rebel.
He is, in fact, unique among country artists, in several respects. He’s a melodic crooner with a subtle but effective concern for the lyric interpretation. At the same time, he’s a spectacular live act who, like Garth Brooks, has that rare knack of connecting personally with every fan jammed into a sold-out stadium. Then there’s that whole beach thing: the “no shoes, no shirt, no problem,” palm trees and margaritas, the lazy wash of surf on sand, easy-going approach to life that he epitomizes in countless PR photos and songs like “Beer in Mexico,” “Tequila Loves Me,” “Hemingway’s Whiskey,” “Guitars and Tiki Bars” and “When the Sun Goes Down.”
Although I’ve interviewed Chesney twice for USA Today, I met him only once, shortly after the Country Music Association hired me. It was a typical Nashville back-slap festival, I think for either Frances Preston or Harold Bradley. From the back of the room, I watched the bigwig parade wind onto the stage to deliver plaques and pose for photo ops. Then Chesney came in and stood next to me. I introduced myself and we talked for maybe a minute before turning our attention back to the stage. That was our first and last personal interaction.
Years later, we did our interviews over the phone, the first to mark the release of his album Cosmic Hallelujah, the second in the wake of Hurricane Irma, which destroyed much of the Virgin Islands, including Chesney’s home on St. John. Though different in tenor, for obvious reasons, both conversations reflected his deliberation and dedication to service, whether through entertaining his fans or helping his neighbors recover from disaster.
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USA Today, Oct. 26, 2016
You’re in line to receive a special BMI Award.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these two awards coming up. I’m very honored to be standing up there for the BMI Award. This is not an award they give out every year. It acknowledges my creative spirit and my creative heart and soul, which is where all this started for me in the first place. I came to Nashville as a songwriter. When people come to our shows these past several years and they see what we’ve built out there, that’s really great. I love what we’ve built out there on the road. But the foundation of it was my creative spirit. That’s a part of my life that I still love and I’m very proud of. To me, songwriting is the foundation of everything that I do on the road and my whole career. A lot of really great songwriters burned that into my psyche early on, working hard as a songwriter.
I remember being so excited just to go to my first BMI Awards as a kid, when I’d just moved to town. This was before I was on the radio. In fact, I hadn’t written any songs at all. I was a brand new artist. To know that I’m being honored by that organization for something I love so much to do, it’s a thrill. To be up there and getting honored as a songwriter is bigger than I could have ever imagined.
You’ll also be receiving the CMA Pinnacle Award.
Past songwriting, the thing I love most is the connection. That’s where songwriting led me. Songwriting led me to a stage where I was able to connect for so many years with the masses. When you’re a kid in East Tennessee with dreams in your head, you don’t dream what’s happened to us because you have no perspective. Especially this past year on the Spread The Love Tour, it was just beautiful. I’ve won CMA Entertainer of the Year four times with that organization. For them to acknowledge that connection with our audience is just great. It’s just beautiful to watch.
I get asked a lot, ‘What’s your favorite part about what you do?’ My favorite part still is the fact that I can take a song I wrote, like “I Go Back” or “Beer in Mexico,” and see this audience sing it back to me. The fact that me and our band and our road family get to make so many people happy and smile with those songs, that’s the best part of what we do. That’s how this was built. The fact that I’m gonna walk up there onstage at the CMA Awards and be given an award that acknowledges that connection is very special.
Unlike many of the awards you’re getting, you know in advance you’re receiving it. Are you preparing remarks or doing anything special?
Not really. I don’t know what I’m gonna say. I may not know until I get up there. But it’s gonna come from the heart. It will be sincerely to thank them. I will speak to my friends and heroes in my audience for a second but I will promise you my speech that night will be to the people watching who were out there in the audience this summer and all the previous summers that led up to this night. That’s why I’m there. Yes, the industry is giving me that award and I will thank them. But the industry wouldn’t be giving me that award if it wasn’t for the people out there that really care about the music. It’s the thread of their lives. Those people will be the ones I talk to.
The Write Stuff
As a writer and as someone who chooses songs by other writers, you have a unique vision.
As a songwriter, honestly, I claw and scratch for everything I get. Coming off The Big Revival album, I wrote a lot of songs but none of them seemed to be perfect for the song cycle that I was in with what ended up being Cosmic Hallelujah. Only two of them made this record. I do sometimes edit myself a little bit too much. But I was really busy this summer and I knew I couldn’t write ten to twelve songs on the road that would be as good as the songs I was going to hear from my friends and from people I didn’t know in Nashville. I’m smart enough to know that. Anyway, it’s impossible for me to write on the road. I’ve tried that. Once I get off the road and get the road dust off of me, I can start to be creative again. I’m starting to get into that period, ironically enough, as I’m getting ready to release a record [laughs].
Now, could I have put twelve songs on my record that I wrote? Sure, but it wouldn’t have ended up being as good as Cosmic Hallelujah is.
Especially when you’ve sung a lot of songs and had a lot of songs on the radio and had the amount of success I’ve been blessed to have you do edit yourself. I can’t necessarily sing things that people are saying today because, honestly, I’ve said it before them and I don’t want to repeat them or myself [laughs]. So the window gets smaller of things you can actually sing about and be authentic. I think about that when I’m writing songs or listening to songs. I didn’t have to think about it ten years ago.
“I had the luxury of not having success when I desperately wanted it.”
The songs you write or choose share a characteristic of conjuring a specific place while also being timeless. How did you develop that perspective?
Well, I don’t know. First of all, when I started as a songwriter I didn’t have that much success, as a writer or a performer. But I was able early on to get my hands on a few songs that did okay. I had the luxury of not having success when I desperately wanted it. It’s only human behavior to want, but my life would not have been the same if it had happened for me when I wanted it. During that time of struggle, in the process of working and writing and getting better, you develop a certain song sense. That’s just the song sense that I developed with songs that really touched me. I might think they’re great now, but are they going to be great ten years from now or whatever? I’ve been blessed to have a few of those songs. The years of struggle helped me develop that song sense and my style, if you will, as a songwriter. I don’t even know I was doing it at the time; out was just where my head was.
Even today in our shows, there are several songs I did in the Nineties that are as prominent today as they were then — or even more! I wrote ‘I Go Back’ by myself. It’s a great moment in our show. The best comment you can get as a writer is for someone to come up and say that a certain song was their favorite song. I’ve had that several times on that song. That song does have a timeless thing to it because it touches on the fact that music stamps our lives in so many ways.
When you realized you wanted to write songs, were there songs that were models for you and that maybe influence you as a writer today?
There’s a lot. Growing up in East Tennessee, we were surrounded by a lot of music. We had a lot of country. We had gospel and bluegrass. We also had what is known today as classic rock — it was just rock then [laughs][. The first time I listened to a Tom Petty record, I loved it. And I loved him because he wrote a lot of the songs. I loved Jackson Browne as a kid because he wrote the songs and went out and sang them.
Once I graduated high school and I started playing music in college, that’s when I discovered Bruce Springsteen. The song structure and the commonality — I just listened over and over to ‘One Step Up and Two Steps Back’ and ended up recording it in 2002 on the No Shoes record.
I graduated high school in the Eighties, so the hair bands were everywhere. But it was those guys and girls that wrote their own songs and went out and sang those songs live. Those are the people I was drawn to and who still inspire me today. They move people by performing songs they create. That’s what matters most to me.
Your first single is “Setting the World on Fire.” This song has a very strong sense of place and passion but it’s not super precise; it leaves a lot to the imagination.
When I heard ‘Setting the World on Fire,’ it was a little vague. But my favorite line of the song is “do you think we’ll live forever? Let’s kill another beer.’ That says so much about being in that moment of new love. A certain angst comes with getting to know someone and realizing that when that relationship has taken the next turn. You live in that moment with that someone where ‘like’ turns into ‘love.’ You just want to be in the moment for as long as you possibly can. I thought about that when I heard that line because they wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world than together in that moment. That’s very powerful. I was like, I know this is set in southern California. I know they’re talking about beers and all this ‘young love’ stuff. But it’s not necessarily about where they fell in love. It’s the emotion of that moment and wanting to live in that moment for as long as you possibly can. I mean, if you live long enough, you know that moment is very rare.
How did you get Pink involved?
After I really listened to it, I went and lived with it for a while. I began to think it needed the female perspective. It wasn’t enough for just me to sing it. I felt that the song was very different for me melodically. The melody really has no genre. I decided I wanted to ask someone I really respected and loved and also had a genre-free voice — and that was Pink. I could talk all day with a lot of adjectives about how great she is. To hear her sing the song speaks a lot to how universal music really is.
She and I had never met each other until we went to the studio to do this. Her growing up in Philadelphia and me growing up in East Tennessee, you would think this wouldn’t work. It’s possible we had different political beliefs and religious backgrounds. We just grew up differently, no doubt about it. When we got into the studio together, it just goes to show you how universal and how wonderful music is. It brought us together! We got in there and it was magic. It was as if we’d been singing together forever. It surprised a lot of people until they heard the record and went, ‘Wow, their voices do match. They do blend very well together.’ I’m glad I was right. I’m glad she did it.
The thing I’m proudest about with ‘Setting the World on Fire’ is that it wasn’t a manipulated moment. The song had to be there. I’ve sung with a lot of people. I did a song with Dave Matthews, a lot with Grace Potter, Willie Nelson, Mac McAnally, whoever. The song was always there first. The thing I’m most proud of is that this moment with Pink was not a manipulated moment with record labels and ‘hey, we’ve got to get these two together and maybe we’ll win an award.’ The song was great; it led to this moment. That’s what I love about it.
“On this record … there’s not one mention of a truck.”
That line ‘do you think we’ll love forever’ has almost a romantic fatalism. ‘Trip Around the Sun’ has a similar attitude of beauty, love and fatalism. ‘All the Pretty Girls,’ ‘Jesus and Elvis,’ it’s very similar. They address movement, death, humanity … very different from what we hear on the charts today.
Hey, look, I’m not knocking anybody. But on this record and Big Revival there’s not one mention of a truck. I thought it was more important to sing about something deeper than that. There’s a lot of humanity in ‘Trip Around the Sun.’ There’s a lot of life pumped into ‘Jesus and Elvis.’ The feeling of that song, the thread of living in the moment, runs all through this record. That started with ‘Trip Around the Sun.’ That’s where ‘cosmic hallelujah’ comes from. The first time I heard that song, I thought about my audience. I thought about my life. I thought about all the people I sing in front of and all the wonderful people we call ‘No Shoes Nation’ that come and listen to us play for a couple of hours and just where I’m at in my life.
The fact that I’ve got this record coming out now and Pink and I are singing together — look, for everything that’s happened in my life, the stars had to align just right. I guess I[m at this point in my career where I’m looking back and going, ‘Wow, that was really great.’ You’re really busy in the moment, but you’re looking at all this stuff and you see that the stars had to align just right. I’m sitting here with Cosmic Hallelujah, with a great singer, with a bad-ass singer on it … if that’s not a cosmic hallelujah, I don’t know what is [laughs].
You might not have had the perspective to record this album five or ten years ago.
Of course not.
Kids do live in the moment. There’s something tragic and beautiful about that. But you need time to develop the perspective to see and sing and write about it.
It’s a great spot to be in as a songwriter and a performer.The Big Revival gave me the license to make Cosmic Hallelujah. Once I went in there and wrote these songs for that record, it just pushed me to do it for this one even more. Being at this spot in my career and in my life does open you up creatively to a lot of wonderful things. That feels really, really good. I’m proud of all the records I’ve made. Each one led me to the next one. You hope that as a human being, a songwriter and an artist, the more you do this the better you get. But the more life you live, the more ups and downs we all deal with on a day-to-day basis, the things that take us up and take us down through good times and bad times, you internalize that. I’m at a spot in my life now where all that stuff I took in can come out on a record.
USA Today, Dec. 8, 2017
… I’ve lived in the Virgin Islands now for seventeen years, I guess. It’s become such a part of my adult life. I’m very close to the characters in the film. I’ve written countless songs about the people there. When this happened, with my island family suffering, it killed me. Over the last fifteen my island dog Cookie has been a part of my life down there. She was a rescue. When Irma hit, there were seventeen people in my house. I flew the first group of those people off-island. The second group that I flew back, there was a friend of mine — we call him Low-Key Bob. He took care of Cookie while I was gone. When I flew them off-island, Low-Key Bob brought Cookie to Tennessee. So we were all living in this state of anxiety.
A week after Cookie got to Tennessee, she passed in my assistant Jill’s [Trunnell] arms. So it was kind of in honor of Cookie. With my assistant Jill, who has been working me on the road for years — she loves to rescue animals — it became a labor of love for us. We were doing so much with Love for Love City to try to relieve some anxiety and stress from a lot of people there who are struggling on-island. Jill said, “What about the animals?” I said, “You’re right. We have to help the animals.” It became a passion for us.
I’ll tell you, man, it’s been an incredible thing to watch. Basically, we emptied the animal shelters in St. John and [sounds like: Viegas]. We sent 123 to rescues or returned to their families. A lot of animals were left behind when people evacuated.
Without Cookie, I probably wouldn’t have done this. I might have, but it’s been such a wonderful thing to watch.
What type of dog was Cookie?
Cookie was a mixture of a lot of island dogs. She had a little pit bull in her but she was a little bit of everything.
We had a lot of help, with Jill and the person to coordinate all of this. The Big Dog Ranch in West Palm Beach have been amazing. They flew two jets down and fifty vets on the ground to take care of everything.
The hardest thing was trying to get all the schedules together with all of the different organizations in mind — pilots, vets, shelters, volunteers. We knew that these animals had to get to the mainland so they could have proper families that would love them. Big Dog Ranch in West Palm Beach was a big part of this. [Sounds like: Non] Dog Rescue paid for fifteen passenger vans that volunteers drove to Virginia and North Carolina and from there to Orlando, Miami, Boston, Raleigh, St. Louis, Worcester … a lot of different places. I’m very proud of all these people.
How many people were involved?
You know what? My assistant Jill could answer that better than I could. But there was a lot of people and a lot of schedules.
Talk about your personal thoughts about the hurricane?
Once they cleared the St. Thomas Airport and we got the okay from FEMA for us to land there, we were going to be one of the ones in the private sector, once we started Love for Love City, that started bringing down aid, along with Michael Bloomberg and his organization. When I went down there, I’ll tell you, man, I’d never seen anything so apocalyptic, that kind of devastation, especially in a place that was known for its beauty and charm. I’d lived there for so long, to see it broken and bleeding, I’d never experienced anything like that in my life. When I got there, it was a ghost of an island.
But I’ll you, it’s getting better every day, thanks to a lot of people. I felt down last week and I noticed a little bit of greenery. When I first went down there, every tree was broken. It looked like it had all been bombed. It was so strange to see a beautiful place, a national park, that torn.
It wasn’t just me and Michael and Tim Duncan. A lot of organizations down there have been really great. St. John Rescue has been incredible. FEMA has been really great. It just took a while. There’s no blueprint for something that’s that broken. But I’m really proud to be a part of helping it to get better and proud of all the people who helped get all the animals off.
Did you lose any friends down there?
I did not. I’m not sure how many casualties there were. When I went down after the storm, an area called Coral Bay was hit especially hard. They were still digging through the rubble. It was really a blessing that casualties were at a minimum. It was literally the largest storm on record in the Caribbean.
How about your place?
My home is gone. There was some of it left, but for the most part it wasn’t livable. And my home was built really strong. If you drive into the main part of the island, there were all these homes that weren’t built from stone and brick and mortar. That’s when I decided we had to do something. We had to help these people.
And the Animals Too
One of the many tragic things you must have seen when walking through this wreckage must have been these confused and terrified abandoned pets.
I did because I’m a dog person now. Ten years I wouldn’t have noticed that but now I do. A girl who used to live in my home and help property-manage it, she worked with her brother at St. John Animal Rescue. I thought about him, and once I got past the anxiety state of giving people water and taking care of their basic needs Jill and I went to work on that. Next thing you know, my assistant Jill contacted Big Dog Ranch, Island Dog Rescue, the animal rescue in [sounds like: Viegas], St. John and St. Thomas. Next thing you know, we’ve got three or four planes going out of there to get these animals healthy, first of all. You can imagine how traumatized they are. So we dealt with that too.
Everybody did a really great job.
You must be doing a dozen different things down there for this project. Do you also go out in the streets with the volunteers to round up animals too?
Yeah, I’ve got a team down there: John McGuinness, Ben [sounds like: Berassa], Marty … eight people. I was down there a couple of days. To see the look on everybody’s faces when we bought them a generator … Because there’s a little bit of power in town but once you get out of there, there’s no power at all. It’s been two months with no power! That’s why I’m really proud of our foundation, my fan base and all the money we’ve raised so far that’s gone to help these people in need. We’ve flown so many generators and coolers down there. You bring that to them and you see a picture of these people literally crying. They’re depending on this. It’s really incredible to see how much they appreciate it because they need it.
What is your personal future with St. John’s?
I don’t know. But if I can be a part of something that makes a difference down there long after I’m gone, it would be to find a way for everyone to have sustainable solar energy.
The rebuilding is going to be measured in years. There’s going to be a big buildup in the Virgin Islands. It’s gonna be a good one. The opportunity now is for it to be even better. I’ve had several conversations with a lot of people about how now we have the opportunity to really get this right on an energy level. If we could find a way for everyone to have sustainable solar energy, it would free a lot of people. It would make everyone’s life down there a lot better. I’ve talked to a lot of people about that. I’m very passionate about it. That is very, very doable in the near future. That’s gonna be my focus. The U.S. and British Virgin Islands are a big part of the lives of a lot of people.
I look forward to seeing you play a stadium show powered by the sun.
Wouldn’t that be great [laughs]? The “By the Sun” Tour! I really believe that’s a very accomplishable goal. I’ve had a couple of conversations with Richard Branson about that.
Where can people go to donate to this project?
People can donate to the Love for Love City Foundation. Go to my website, kennychesney.com. But also, or they can go to loveforlovecity.org. We’re gonna be doing several things in the near future. I do believe, Bob, that music is medicine in a lot of ways. Just a couple of days ago I did a show with Jimmy Buffett in Tallahassee to raise money for hurricane relief. He’s very passionate about the Florida Keys, as am I. So music is very powerful. It helps heal. I can see myself doing more of those things in the near future.
What a privilege to be in the position to make that kind of a difference.
It is, man. I feel very blessed. This is such a big part of my journey. In a lot of ways, the Virgin Islands have fed my creativity and made me a different person. To see them hurting and bleeding like this, it feels like my duty to do something to help.
You’re spending Thanksgiving with your grandmother.
I am! My grandmother is doing great. As long as she’s still living, the family unit is intact — my grandmother, my mother and me. It’s just like when I was six [laughs]. I still go over there on Thanksgiving, as if I was a child [laughs]. I gotta go home for Thanksgiving. I couldn’t go anywhere else.
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