Kenny Chesney – Born

Kenny Chesney’s always made it look so easy, one might take for granted how deeply rooted his love of songwriters, live music and the people who share his passion actually is. Beyond being the only country artist in Billboard’s Top 10 Touring Artists of the Last 25 Years for the last 15… the four Country Music Association and four consecutive Academy of Country Music Entertainer of the Year Awards, as well as a CMA Album and ACM Male and Single Award… the record for most No. 1’s on Billboard’s Country Airplay Chart and over 31 million albums sold… the East Tennessee songwriter/superstar has forged No Shoes Nation, a country without borders populated by millions of people from one coast to the other.And with BORN, his first album since 2020, the man the Los Angeles Times called “the People’s Superstar” and the Wall Street Journal deemed “the King of the Road” creates a project that dips into and considers the myriad kinds of American music that capture coming of age in the 21st century.“All the way back to playing for tips at Chuckie’s Trading Post and Quarterbacks when I was in college, I understood some songs pull people closer to you,” explains the unassuming supernova. “I knew even then, that’s what I wanted: to make music that showed people their lives, to sing those songs for people like me.“I was lucky: I got to Nashville when the guys who defined what great songs were everywhere. They were all original, all unique – and they showed you the power of songs that hit people where they live. So when it was time to start really dialing in BORN, I decided I wanted an album that reached across all the things I love to do.”Reach it does. From the churning title track to the smoky heartbeat of “One Lonely Island,” the banjo speckled life-as-we-love-it “Just To Say We Did,” to the surging, guitars wide open “Long Gone” and the sea shanty-esque easy-come/easy-go “This Too Shall Pass,” this is the full-tilt, wide-open life affirming country Chesney’s created with one of the genre’s most enduring catalogues and built his high charging shows around.It’s not that people need a refuge in today’s polarizing, punching down world. But from dropping “Young,” from his multi-Platinum breakthrough No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems, Chesney has sought to release songs that reflect the thrills and life moments of people living between the coasts. It’s a smaller way of living, but no less wide open – or electrifying. “I realized no one was singing songs about how people like me were living, how our lives looked or felt. So, I decided to write and look for something that wasn’t being seen, but very much defining an awful lot of people’s lives.”BORN is all about the ecstasy of being completely wide open to life. But it’s also about those tugging internal contradictions, moments of falter, desire and bittersweet longing that stain even the most exuberant lives. Sometimes it’s the elegiac toast to someone who’s passed in “Wherever You Are Tonight,” or respecting the freedom another finds in the open road that drives “Top Down.”But even more, it’s the tangled-up uncoupling and erotically charged wistful feelings that get in the way in “Thinkin’ Bout” and the on/off can’t quite let go of “Come Here, Go Away.” Grown-up, but redolent of any relationship at any age where there are compelling reasons to move on, but chemistry keeps pulling you back.“Everyone’s been there, everyone knows there’s no such thing as a clean break,” Chesney says. “An