Coming soon to a stadium near you: Megastar Kenny Chesney. He works hard so you can relax
On his epic summer tours, he creates a tiki-bar atmosphere on football fields in places like Indianapolis and Kansas City. He makes 50,000 people think they're at a tin-roofed beachside canteen that seats nine. He preaches simplicity and oceanside afternoons in songs that hit a demographic sweet spot: folks young enough to feel free and old enough to reminisce about easier times. This recipe has made Chesney really, really popular.
He's sold 30 million records and had 23 songs top the country charts (and that's well before the June release of his 13th album, Welcome to the Fishbowl). He's also sold a forehead-slapping 10 million tickets, a figure that compelled the Academy of Country Music to bestow on him something called the Crystal Milestone Award. "When we do Tampa Stadium this year, it'll be the 70th stadium show we've done," Chesney says. Guys retire from the NFL having played in fewer stadiums.
But all the sun-kissed lyrics obscure a tireless work ethic. It takes a huge effort to make millions chill out. Chesney may conjure up palm trees and sand dunes in some of America's most spacious sports cathedrals, but he doesn't do it by lying in a hammock, sliding his hat over his face, and waiting for the magic to happen. "It is a big misconception that all I do is sing and write songs and sit on the beach," Chesney says. "It's really not true."
Chesney has his hands in every aspect of the show: the timing of the lighting, the content of the video, the color of the bus. He cites two reasons: "One, I'm a little bit of a control freak. Two, I'm a whole lot of workaholic. If the catering sucks, whatever, it reflects on me because I pay for it. That's why."
THE FRUITS OF THOSE LABORS can be found in the living room of Chesney's stone mansion in the mountains outside Nashville. If it's not the highest spot in the county, it's close; tree-covered slopes fall away on all sides. The table we're sitting at is about the only horizontal space in the home not covered with photos, memorabilia, and awards. Mostly awards.
The roads to this hilltop, both physical and metaphorical, start not far away, a few ridges to the east, in the small town of Luttrell, Tennessee, where Chesney was raised. There wasn't much to do in Luttrell outside of sports, school, church, and music. He went to East Tennessee State for marketing and thought about playing baseball there until, he says, he realized he'd have to eat, drink, and sleep it. "All I wanted to do was eat, drink, and sleep," he says with a laugh.
One day he found himself writing a song for a girl he liked from class. "It must not have been a very good one," he says. "Didn't work." Still, it was clear that music was trumping marketing in every metric that mattered. So he jumped in. He wrote songs for the Acuff-Rose publishing empire and then struck out on his own. "But right after I got a record deal, in those first 2 years, nothing was really happening." He pauses. "First 4 or 5 years, actually. But we were having fun, and I was thinking, It doesn't get any better than this.'"
After a while, Chesney began thinking otherwise, that it could get better. "I remember lying in bed one night, going, 'You have to step it up. You have to make yourself better,'" he said. "'There's somebody some-where you don't know—and you may never meet them—but they're kicking your livin' ass.' And I don't want to let somebody have that on me."
BEFORE HIS GAZE TURNED TO THE SHORE, it turned to the sky. On quiet nights in Luttrell, Chesney would stargaze in his yard. "That's where I started to wonder if there was anything else out there beyond my street. And I remember going with my family to the ocean and thinking the same thing."
Chesney found his shaker of salt in the early 2000s, when his musical style began drifting from traditional pop-country to Jimmy Buffett with a twang. "I went to shoot an old video in St. Thomas, years ago. And I got that same feeling as I had in my backyard, that there was something else out there. I still have that feeling. That's why I've been exploring it for so long."
He has a place in the Virgin Islands, plus a boat that's pretty close to being eligible for statehood. He flies down there when he has the time, especially at the close of the summer tours, when he brings his crew members and their families along for a week of expenses-paid unwinding under the Caribbean sun. Not a bad corporate perk.
"Everything I do is based around time, commitments, deadlines," Chesney says. "And I get all that, and it fuels me too. But the thing that makes me happiest is when my day doesn't revolve around time, when I can wash a lot of the road dust off, get the ringing out of my ears."
When he's on the road, life is all business. Consider this: Moments before Chesney hit the stage in Columbia, South Carolina, on the first night of his 2008 tour, he caught his foot in one of the set's hydraulic lifts. He was trapped there for 40 seconds, his right foot being slowly crushed by machinery while his crew struggled to free him and his band vamped onstage. It worked: Chesney came out, not even late enough for the crowd to notice, and did the show, limping. Tests later showed a hematoma from the ankle down. He didn't miss a single tour date. "I'm going to tape it up," he said at the time, "and I'm going to get out there."
Chesney feels he owes his fans. "They picked us to spend money on this summer," he says. But he owes himself just as much. The pressure to perform, he argues, is better than mailing it in. And the results speak for themselves. "It would be hard to overstate how important Kenny is to country music," says Michael Bryan, operations manager of Clear Channel in Nashville and program director of Music City station The Big 98 WSIX. "His single with Tim McGraw was literally played every hour here and at over 120 Clear Channel stations across the country when it was released [in April]. It doesn't get much bigger."
Staying fit helps the act. Chesney's goal isn't to swell with muscle—"I don't go in here and try to bench-press 200 pounds," he says once we're down in his basement gym. He just wants to maintain energy for 2-hour concerts in summer humidity. "You think you're sprinting on this treadmill," he says. "When I'm up there it's like I'm at a constant sprint at a 15 level. But the thing you have onstage that you don't have in the gym is adrenaline."
Chesney also closely monitors his diet. "Growing up in East Tennessee, everything you do revolves around food," he says. He doesn't eat many dairy products, hasn't touched salt in 10 years, hasn't had bread "in a while." When I arrived at the house, Chesney was blending up his postworkout protein shake, served in a big plastic Corona cup. Once tour prep starts, his entire diet is adjusted (except on Sunday, his cheat day). "I've never abused my body with drugs," he says. "I've never smoked. But I will say that I've probably been overserved a lot. You can't spend 19 years on the road and not have a few drinks."
And after Chesney closes out this summer's tour with two nights at Gillette Stadium, outside Boston, he plans to reward his body for another season's work. That means heading back to the Caribbean to unwind in pretty much the way you'd expect.
"I'm gonna have a couple of cold Coronas and listen to music and watch the sun move across the sky. And I'll try to relax and turn my brain off. If I could find the light switch to turn that off . . ." he trails off a bit, recalibrating. "But I'm glad it's not off. I wouldn't know what to do. I'm like a shark. I've got to be constantly moving."
RUN, KENNY, RUN
Kenny Chesney's trainer, Daniel Meng, C.P.T., of MUV Fitness Coaching in Nashville, has worked with the singer for more than a decade. their training plan revolves around the calendar, starting in January with total-body conditioning and ramping up toward the launch of Chesney's all-important summer tour.
To boost Chesney's stamina in the weeks leading up to that first tour date, Meng tacks on 15 minutes of high-intensity interval training to the end of a 45-minute strength-training session. "It's a very intense workout routine usually reserved for athletes," Meng says, "but Kenny has a certain standard he holds himself to when putting on a show, and it's my job to get him there."
CHESNEY'S INTERVALS
Jog at Level 6 on a treadmill for 1 minute. Sprint at Level 9-10 for 30 seconds.
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