Kenny Chesney’s ‘in the moment’ album
Country star’s “Song for the Saints” inspired by Hurricane Irma victims
Kenny Chesney was at home in Nashville, Tennessee, but his mind was on the 17 people sheltered in his house in the Virgin Islands, where deadly Hurricane Irma was wreaking havoc. Chesney frantically checked his cellphone for news of their fate and that of the place where he had sought refuge for 20 years.
With the electricity knocked out and cell towers destroyed, days passed last September with no updates from St. John. Chesney didn’t know if the people in his home were alive. He was terrified, riddled with anxiety, and he started writing songs of hope inspired by the Virgin Islands to cope. The fate of his friends still unknown, “Song for the Saints” was among the first he finished. Musicians gathered around Chesney in a Nashville recording studio to hear it, and as his finger hovered over the play button, his phone dinged with news. His friends were safe. His home? Destroyed.
“It was a really, really scary time,” Chesney recalls. Seated in his manager’s office on Music Row, as the singer remembers how he felt during those uncertain days, his nerves become raw. He rocks in his chair, knots his fingers behind his head, then stares at his hands when he moves them to the table.
“All that anxiety and all that fear made me hyperfocused to a point where I became it,” he says. “I would get up every day, go into the studio and make this record. I’ve never made a record that was so in the moment, and I think you can hear that angst, and I think you can hear the anxiety.”
In stores Friday, “Songs for the Saints” is the album Chesney didn’t want to make. As he wrote songs for therapy, they manifested into a means to help hurricane sur-
vivors. The 11-song collection is about rebuilding – not of the islands, but of the human spirit. A departure from Chesney’s guitar-driven country, the album was recorded in three weeks and rings of a singer/songwriter project driven by vulnerability and determination. It’s a love letter to the island of St. John, and all proceeds will be donated to Chesney’s Love for Love City Foundation, which finances rescue and rebuilding projects after Irma.
“This is a resurrection record and a hopeful record,” says Cris Lacy of Warner Music Nashville. “I put it in and was overcome with the heart and spirit of this record. It’s vintage Kenny Chesney. It’s so inspiring. He made choices for the theme of the record. He wasn’t constructing it, he was just feeling it.”
Jenn Manes, a blogger and tour guide on St. Thomas, says that in the trauma and wake of Hurricane Irma, she had been too overwhelmed to cry. Sunburned, exhausted and scared, Manes gathered with hundreds of people on the rooftop of a pizza restaurant in St. John the day after Irma thrashed the island. It was the only place to get a cell signal, and as Manes joined the crowd, holding her phone in the air to get more bars, it pinged with a message from her father:
“Kenny’s team is on the way,” it read. “You’re all going to be o.k.”
Chesney landed a plane on St. John as soon as soon as FEMA would allow it. He took a helicopter tour of the island and wept as he absorbed the extent of the devastation. He had spent two decades cultivating friendships, drinking beer and sharing life with the characters he had met there, and in that moment, many were unaccounted for.
The singer flew the 17 people who sheltered in his St. John home to Nashville. Chesney remembers the shock, fear and uncertainty fixed in their eyes when they got off the plane. His guests camped out in his kitchen and home theater while he spent hours a day in the recording studio to complete “Songs for the Saints.” When he came home, they watched The Weather Channel together.
His team of people arrived on St. John. Because his relief efforts were privately funded and not tied to the government, Chesney’s team could react quickly. They cleared roads, cut people out of their homes and communicated the victims’ immediate needs to the singer. At one point in the studio, Chesney stepped away from the mic, checked his phone and found 327 new text messages. There were no antibiotics. People needed generators, coolers and water. There was no dog food.
Two days after Irma, Manes and her boyfriend encountered the singer’s team and were delighted to discover it was largely comprised of people they knew.
“It was pretty incredible that these average people stepped up, and what they’ve done here is nothing short of a miracle,” Manes says. “Most of them are still here today helping us.”
When Chesney realized the island’s ballfield was being used to land relief helicopters and the children of St. John had no place to play, he provided musical instruments to give them a creative outlet. He promised that if they learned to play them, he would fly them to one of his concerts. In June, Chesney brought more than two dozen kids and their instructors to his show in Philadelphia.
“They were really confused because they were used to seeing Island Kenny, not Stage Kenny,” the singer laughs.
He also partnered with animal rescue groups and has flown more than 1,400 dogs displaced by the hurricane to the mainland, where they have found homes – including a few adopted by the singer’s staff. Chesney is convinced the animals would have died otherwise.
Chesney’s team isn’t alone in the relief efforts. Former NBA star Tim Duncan and a group organized by Michael Bloomberg have also stepped up to mend infrastructure on the island. Chesney hopes “Songs for the Saints” will provide emotional healing, too. Home to his record-breaking 30th No. 1 hit, “Get Along,” the album also includes duets with Ziggy Marley, Jimmy Buffet and Mindy Smith – all singers whose music was part of Chesney’s daily life on St. John.
“When you think about all the people it could help and how it could help change their psyche and give healing, (‘Songs for the Saints’) is probably the most important record I’ve ever made,” Chesney says. “I hope they get as much healing out of listening to it as I did from making it.”