Chesney won’t play by rules
With his album ‘Revival’ out today and a tour on tap, he’s hitting a new stride
‘I didn’t want to make a record that sounded like I made it on a conveyor belt,’ country star says.
Kenny Chesney knew he could have gone the brocountry route, but he opted not to.
“I didn’t want to repeat myself, which would have been easy to do,” says Chesney, who returns today with his 15th studio album,
The Big Revival, after taking a year off from touring in 2013. “I also didn’t want to make the record that everybody’s making today that seems to be pretty popular. I refuse.”
Over a recording career spanning 20 years, Chesney has been no stranger to songs about small towns, celebrations and large quantities of alcohol. There’s even some of that on The Big Re
vival. At 46, though, Chesney expects more out of his material.
“I didn’t want to make a record
that sounded like I made it on a conveyor belt,” he says. “And I’ve been guilty of that.”
The Big Revival’s title track, a song about snake-handling that includes the unforgettable lyric, “Praise the Lord and pass me a copperhead,” sounds like anything but an assembly-line product. He knows the song will make a heck of an opening number when he tours next spring. As he prepared The Big Revival, Chesney found himself at a career crossroads. In 2014, he’s still one of the 10 most-played acts on country radio and the only one to have been putting out hits as far back as 1995, when Fall in Love gave him his first big single. His 2013 tour drew 1.2 million fans, second only to Taylor Swift.
However, while American Kids, the lead single from The Big Re
vival, spent two weeks atop USA TODAY’s country airplay chart, Chesney hadn’t had a No. 1 for two years. And last year’s Life on
a Rock was his first album since his 1994 debut that failed to sell a million copies.
“There isn’t an artist out there that isn’t two bad singles away from the penalty box,” says Gregg Swedberg, program director of K102 in Minneapolis. “Does he need to make hit records? Sure. But I listen to this album, and I think he should have a bunch of hits for the foreseeable future.”
Whether Chesney’s singing about the ’80s suburban youth of American Kids or the Bonnaroo-attending free spirit in Wild
Child, a new duet with Grace Potter, it’s an album that celebrates community, especially the one Chesney and his fans have come to fondly call “No Shoes Nation.” “Like the phrase in American
Kids says, we’re ‘a little messed up, but we’re all alright,’ ” Chesney says. “That phrase defines my road family, it defines my audience, it defines me — look, you’ve got to be a little messed up to do this for a living anyway.”
He already is gearing up for his return to the road. “I have a 3-D rendering of what my stage is going to look like,” he says. “We just don’t know when we’re going to set it up.” And he’ll take his own long-standing community out with him: “I’ve got three or four buddies I went to high school with, went to college with, and they’ve been with me (in my crew) this whole time.”
Chesney expects to play arenas, stadiums and, perhaps, amphitheaters, with a few special shows in the mix. “We’re probably going to do 18 stadiums, maybe a few beach shows, who knows? Maybe a couple of acoustic shows in some theaters.
“I think it’d be interesting to go into a stadium market but go into a theater the night before and play acoustic. Just because.”