More on the "Road"

Source: Tennessean.com

Road rises up to meet Kenny Chesney Despite a year of rigorous touring, entertainer managed to pull off a highly anticipated new album. Now he's ready to do it all again.

Kenny Chesney sat outside this fall, on a sunny porch out by a pool. Land and trees surrounded his Williamson County residence, which could be called a house if it were significantly smaller.
In Chesney's career, he's sold more albums than Paul Simon or Snoop Dog, and on Tuesday he'll release an album, The Road and the Radio, that looks to be one of country's biggest releases of the year. He's got an ABC network special coming up on Nov. 23 (7 p.m., WKRN-Channel 2), too, and his shows routinely fill arenas with crowds that are younger and louder than is typical in the country genre.

The whole thing looks to be a dream realized for Chesney, one of Tennessee's most famous native sons and the Country Music Association's reigning entertainer of the year. Still, it's no surprise when Chesney answers a routine "How are you?" with a weary chuckle and a quick, "I've been better."

It's not all the marriage thing, either. Even without this year's whirlwind, ill-fated union to actress Renee Zellweger, Chesney would likely have spent part of 2005 crossing the line that separates burning it up from burning out. On June 25, he stood onstage in front of 21,000 people in Tacoma, Wash., knowing full well that he didn't feel like . . . well, like being onstage in front of 21,000 people.

"I was so tired that I didn't want to be there, for the first time in 12 years," Chesney said. "I gave them all I had. I remember laying in my bus bunk one night, going, 'Don't you ever be this tired ever again.' I used to wonder how people could go into the hospital because of exhaustion. I didn't understand it. Now I do.

"Look, getting married is stressful enough, I don't care who you are," he continued. "But with everything I had going on, everything in front of me at my plate, I felt myself changing, and I didn't like it. I wasn't the guy that's fun-loving. I felt like I was treating people different, that I was shorter with them. I felt that with my family and friends."

If Tacoma was a low point, it shouldn't have been terribly unexpected. For months, Chesney had been touring hard, and the two or three days that he had off the road every couple of weeks were spent working on an album that he was increasingly worried might be nothing terribly special.

"I was on the bus one night and told the band, 'I've got an average record.' I stayed up at night because of it. I used to just want to get on the radio and didn't think about the songs so much, but I didn't get to where I'm selling out stadiums by being average. Every album has to be better, but different. It's hard to stay who you are but give people a different ride."

Enter Aimee Mayo, the Nashville songwriter who called Chesney in late July to tell him she had a song he should hear. The song was called Who You'd Be Today, written by Mayo and Bill Luther, and she played it for him in her car, parked in the lot outside the Tracking Room at Emerald Sound Studios, where Chesney and co-producer Buddy Cannon were working on the album.

Chesney instantly loved the song, a rumination on a friend who died young. He recorded it the next day, and the inclusion of Who You'd Be Today and another July find, Like Me, lend some gravity and cohesion to the finished album. The first single off the album, Who You'd Be Today, is now at No. 4 on Billboard's country chart and it's continuing to climb.

"It's only been on the charts for seven weeks, so that is breakneck speed," said Wade Jessen, the country chart director for Billboard. For Chesney, the song offered more than a potentially lucrative single. "When she brought that song to me, I felt like I had something to wrap the rest of the record around," Chesney said. "Who You'd Be Today was the universal song that I didn't have that I now had, and I was able to go from there and find a few other things that were pieces of the puzzle."

Mayo's cameo came at the right time, as Cannon and Chesney were bearing down on the deadline to finish the album. In the past, Chesney has released albums in the spring, and his status as one of country's best-sellers is underscored by his label's decision to release The Road and the Radio in November, a time of the year when only the most commercially dominant artists are likely to put albums out, because it's difficult to get retailers and media to pay attention to mid-level albums during the holiday season.

"We think it's going to be a huge impact record," said RCA Label Group Nashville head Joe Galante. "It's one of the most important records of the fourth quarter, for all genres. It is the biggest release in the country format, but aside from that, it's one of the biggest records in the business."

Galante knows that now, but a few months ago he was worried that the thing might not get done at all.

"There was a concern at one moment. There was that small matter of a marriage in the middle of the recording process," Galante said with the relieved laugh of someone who has dodged a bullet. "We were still doing the tour, filming the special. There was a lot going on. He wasn't able to write the way he wanted to write until the end of that record. We were all kind of jumping."
Chesney's lack of new original songs amped up the need to find material written by others that would speak to his own experiences.

One of those songs is David Lee Murphy and Rivers Rutherford's Living in Fast Forward, which depicts "a hillbilly rock star out of control."

"I heard that song and thought, 'I'm living that,' " he said. "I'm living my life in fast forward now, and I have been for years. That 'hillbilly rock star out of control' line . . . at a point that was very, very accurate." "Out of control," Chesney said, can mean many different things. In 2005, he certainly didn't feel in control of his own schedule or frame of mind. His ability to finish an album under such scattered conditions is a point of pride.

"This was the toughest album I've ever made," he said. "It got to where Buddy and I didn't know what we had and what we didn't. We cut songs we'd forgotten about, and I think I was making decisions based on exhaustion and not clarity. But it worked out, and I'm really proud of this album, because it evolved through the cracks of a lot of other stuff. I didn't have a year to sit home and work on it. I don't think you hear how tired I was when you listen to this record, and I'm glad of that."

One of the songs Chesney did write for the album is Beer in Mexico, one he wrote at rocker Sammy Hagar's house last October. Though the song's title recalls Chesney's sand-friendly past hits No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problem and When the Sun Goes Down, its lyrics are more contemplative than celebratory.

"I was getting . . . hey, do we see a pattern here?" laughed Chesney. "I was getting out of another relationship at the time and I thought, 'What is going on? Should I marry this person or not?' In the bridge of the song, it says, 'Maybe I'll settle down, get married/ Or stay single and stay free/ Which road I'll travel is still a mystery to me.' But I realized I didn't have to make that decision in that moment. I realized I could sit there, dangle my feet in the water and have another beer."

After that song was written, Chesney's schedule ratcheted back up and songwriting got squeezed out of the picture. Then it was record-making, headlining the string of shows that Billboard just named the top package tour of 2005 and entering into a relationship that inspired public headlines and, though he won't talk about it in specifics, some measure of private heartache.

"The statement in town is that it all starts with a song, and I couldn't write much this year," he said. "The tank was kind of empty. But it's filling up. It's down at the gas station right now. Leave it to life to fill your tank up, you know?" •