When I reach Kenny Chesney, he’s resting up after a residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, making history as the first country music artist to perform at the venue. He’s earned a break. Since his debut album, 1994’s In My Wildest Dreams, a staggering sixty-one of his songs have landed in the top ten of the Billboard country charts, including thirty-three solo number ones. He’s the only country artist whose tours have grossed more than a billion dollars. And his peers just voted him into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
A dynamo onstage whose injections of reggae and rock have transformed country, the East Tennessee native is soft-spoken and introspective in conversation. Chesney really only began to reflect on his success during the year he spent working on his just-released first book, Heart Life Music, with journalist Holly Gleason. “It’s a love letter to the creative part of my life…to how I grew up, to the people who shaped me,” he says, “to the music I heard, from childhood into adulthood.”
The book begins with a youthful memory: lying in the grass and staring at the stars, wondering what life had in store. “I was always a seeker,” he says, “and that’s where the songwriting gift came from.” Chesney’s parents divorced early, so he grew up among his mother’s rambunctious, close-knit kin in the country while often spending weekends with his father in Knoxville. Music was ubiquitous, and concerts by the likes of Keith Whitley, Jackson Browne, Jones, Haggard, Twitty, and Alabama proved formative. Otherwise, he immersed himself in sports, church, and family. “My grandmother went to work in the school cafeteria so she could be closer to us,” he recalls. His mother’s beauty parlor employed so many relatives that on trips home during college he could see most everyone in one stop.
After graduating from East Tennessee State, he decamped to Nashville, landing his first contract as a songwriter. Chesney and Gleason offer keen insights into the country music industry and Nashville’s evolution from small town to metropolis. But at heart, the book is a meditation on the power of music and creativity. Take Chesney’s songwriting: Though some critics have simplified him, pointing to hits too easily categorized as novelties (“She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”), such early compositions as “The Tin Man” and “I Go Back” stand the test of time, while cuts from 2024’s Born, like his cowritten “The Way I Love You Now,” testify to his lasting talent. Willie Nelson and Bruce Springsteen count among his fans. Chesney also remains thankful for Jimmy Buffett: “He was one of the first singer-songwriters who taught me it was truly possible to paint pictures with words and melody.”
Like the best storytellers, Chesney employs vivid imagery and a vibrant sense of place, as in “I Go Back”:
And I go back to a two-toned short bed Chevy
Drivin’ my first love out to the levee
Livin’ life with no sense of time
And I go back to the feel of a fifty-yard line
“I still feel like I’m in the middle of the journey,” he says. But the book forced him “to relive things, and for me, it was all good things.” As for that journey, Chesney has another Sphere residency in 2026. That’s after he wraps up a book tour to bring Heart Life Music to his fans—and those who may be surprised to find that he contains far more layers than they thought.
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