"The more you live, the more you know…
and the more you experience, the more you reflect on everything around you.
You become more aware, whether you want to or not -
So, as an artist and a songwriter,
you look for ways to see it and tell people about it,
to see if they're going through the same things…
The thing about Be As You Are is
once you write an album about realizations, finding a new way to live,
it changes how you do this."
For Kenny Chesney -- the reigning Country Music Association and Academy of Country Music Entertainer of the Year -- music has always been the current that's run through his life, happy and sad. With The Road & The Radio, the singer/songwriter from Luttrell, Tennessee raises the stakes on both the intensity of his straight-up-the-middle power-country and deepening sense of introspection.
Certainly his self-penned Be As You Are: Songs From An Old Blue Chair -- which debuted at #1 on Billboard's all-genre Top 200 with no single and no tour, scanning platinum in just a few weeks -- showed him the fans who helped him sell over a million tickets for his revved-up concerts each of the past three summers found a lot that reflected their own lives and soul searches in Chesney's own truth.
With "Who You'd Be Today," the man who won the CMA Album of the Year for his last major studio album When The Sun Goes Down wonders about the people in his life who've had untimely deaths and what their lives might be like today… indeed, wonders how their lives would be intertwined… and finds comfort in the fact that he will see them again in the next life. Or the album's closing bookend "Like Me," sung from the perspective of a dreamer who made it who celebrates those who're along the way, especially the ones who refuse to relinquish the quest even when the odds and reality say it's -- like Don Quixote tilting at windmills -- folly, an impossible dream.
"I don't know if I'd've heard a song like 'Like Me' and recognized all those characters for what they where; I don't know if I'd see the way they were living the dream through the fringes and believing with everything they have in something that probably wasn't gonna happen," admits the man who wrote the songs-we-love-as-musical-time-stamp "I Go Back" on When The Sun Goes Down. "Because, you know, for the longest time, I was one of those guys… one of the ones who had no chance of making it.
"But I refused to believe I couldn't… I wouldn't give up… I just kept looking forward, seeing what else I could do and finding people who'd dream along with me. You know, I think that's a lot of it, too, that willingness to keep dreaming no matter what anyone tells you… that, and working hard, harder than sometimes you even know you can."
In a lot of ways, "Like Me" is the story of Kenny Chesney before and after. A too small kid who wanted to play football, who through tenacity and heart found a way to make the team. A guy who didn't get his first guitar until his freshman year in college, but loved singing for people -- even if it's just the dishwasher. A kid whose break came with a publishing deal at Acuff-Rose, an old school Nashville publishing company that once signed Hank Williams -- a break many get, few ever harvest.
But just like high school football, Kenny Chesney got a hold and didn't let go. Building, considering, working harder. And always -- always -- believing in the music. Along the way, he's amassed some amazing stats: the three summers of over a million fans -- outselling even U2 (by 200,000 tickets) for the first half of 2005 -- and being the only country artist to play stadiums this year in tough-to-crack Pittsburgh, Boston and Washington, DC; seeing When The Sun Goes Down, No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems and Greatest Hits pass quadruple platinum and inch to the 5,000,000 mark; his first network special: ABC's "Kenny Chesney: Somewhere In The Sun," which airs in the highest-traffic sweeps week on Nov. 23; but mostly there's the music…
