Chesney’s path smoothed by blurring music genres
Posted on Tuesday, June 17, 2008
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Kenny Chesney may be one of the biggest acts in country music, but the 40-year-old who grew up in Luttrell, Tenn., knows he’s not your daddy’s country singer.
“I don’t think that I’m what some of the more traditionalists would call ‘three chords and the truth, ’” he says. “The songs that I sing tell stories. I think that they are about real life. I think that they hopefully remind people of their first date, the first kiss, the first time they fell in love, the first time they had their heart broke. I’ve had people tell me that.
“ I do recognize the fact that when we put together a live show, that’s my main focus. Maybe our show isn’t as traditional as other artists of this format, but I think that’s a good thing. Our show is really edgy. I cut my music that way. I think the stories are country. I think the way I sing them is country. But I like to make music in a live show that will make people realize that they’ve been to a concert. Our show isn’t the kind of show where you walk in and buy a beverage and popcorn and sit down and enjoy the music. This is not that kind of crowd. It’s not my kind of music.”
Chesney recently won his fourth straight Entertainer of the Year Award from the Academy of Country Music. He has sold more than 30 million records and has been a certified country-radio staple since 1999 and his hit “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.” He has scored more than 30 Top 10 hits and has sold more than 1 million concert tickets each year for the past six years.
Chesney’s 2007 tour outgrossed all country-music shows that year, and most rock tours. He wrote “Take Me There,” a No. 1 hit for Rascal Flatts in 2007, and produced Willie Nelson’s latest album, Moment of Forever. He is the biggest country star since Garth Brooks, but many people still think of him only as the guy who was briefly married to movie star Renee Zellweger in 2005.
But Chesney is a country singer for 21 stcentury America. As the edges of suburbia and rural America blend in mass-media culture, there are few purely country musicians. The Eagles, the decadent Southern California rock archetypes, have been more influential on today’s Nashville sound than the traditionalists, and while the music remains rooted in blue-collar experience, the musical vocabulary of rock has infiltrated the heart of contemporary country.
“I can’t help the way I sing,” Chesney says. “That’s the way I was brought up in east Tennessee. I was consumed by a lot of different styles of music, which is why I think I make the music that I make. I was consumed by country, gospel and bluegrass. But I remember as a kid riding home from Little League baseball practice and hearing Lynyrd Skynyrd. I didn’t know who they were, but I liked it. I remember hearing Van Halen when I got into high school. That music was amazing to me.
“ I started being drawn to a lot of singersongwriters like [Bruce ] Springsteen, [John ] Mellencamp and [Jimmy ] Buffett. That’s what ended up turning me on the most was the guys that wrote their songs and sang ’em.”
His father was a teacher and his mother a hairdresser. He graduated with a marketing degree from East Tennessee University, where he belonged to a fraternity and played gigs around local clubs.
Chesney counts Springsteen among his admirers, who started a friendship with the singer by writing a letter after Chesney covered his “One Step Up” on the 2002 album No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems. His open affection for’ 80 s rock echoes his most obvious predecessor in the modern country field, Brooks, who made no secret of his admiration for arena rockers such as Kiss and Journey.
“I think the lines are getting blurrier and blurrier and I may have something to do with it, I’m not sure,” Chesney says. “I do believe that people love great music. You can put a genre on it or not.... You still have your core traditional artists — that’s never going to change. I think one of the reasons for my success, in my music, I’ve written songs about how I live my life, how much fun I have, and I think that’s kind of bled over to my audience. They don’t hear me sing about whiskey and heartbreak that much. I let other guys do that.”
He keeps a place in Nashville, but manages to spend a fair amount of time around the Virgin Islands.
“When I produced that record for Willie, I was probably in the biggest personal funk of my life. Nothing inspired me. I don’t mind telling you, after my divorce with Renee, I was completely uninspired. God could have laid the best song in front of me and I wouldn’t have known. I sat there with Willie Nelson the first day and realized all that was going to change. When I got done with that record, two or three months with him, I was never more inspired by a person, an artist and a songwriter. I left that whole session and that whole album looking at things in different ways.”
On his current Poets & Pirates Tour, Chesney is using different supporting acts, such as country superstars Brooks and Dunn — and his pal, rock star Sammy Hagar.
“I hope when I’m at the point in my career that he is,” he says, “that I still approach it with the same type of head space that he’s in, because he’s just a joy to be around. He is just full of life. That breathes in his music. I think that flows over into the crowd.”
Chesney is a country boy with a rock ’n’ roll heart.
“I’ve seen our audience grow and I’ve seen it grow into a pretty diverse, eclectic group of people. I’ve seen that we have a lot of people out there who maybe don’t listen to country radio every day, who channel-surf and listen to a lot of other things, who come to our show and love the music. I’ve seen that gradually happen the past four or five years. I think that’s one of the reasons we can play the Giants baseball stadium in the middle of San Francisco. When I was a college kid dreaming of this, I could have never dreamed that stuff. It’s a lot of fun from my perspective.”