Kenny Chesney has a best-selling book, he was just inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and he’s a nominee at Wednesday night’s CMA Awards. It’s no wonder he sees his career as far beyond anything he could have imagined.
On Center Stage: Countdown to the CMA Awards, airing on ABC Tuesday night, Kenny says, “If you pull back from all of it, it’s all just a big dream. It’s this kid that laid in the backyard of his grandmother’s house that would look up at the sky at night and wonder if there was anything out there. And if you’d have told that kid that dream would’ve developed into this, I would’ve told you you were crazy.”
Kenny said during a childhood consumed by sports, music entered the picture in a prominent way. “Music was always in my life, but I didn’t know it was going to be my life.”
He got his start when he played for the East Tennessee State University Bluegrass band, saying the program “changed my life.” He also started performing at local bars and restaurants, where he would play for tips and “all the enchiladas I could eat.”
In 1991, he moved to Nashville to pursue a career in music. He went on to score a number of hits, including “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,” but it was the 2002 anthem “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems” that launched him to superstardom and brought him a passionate fan base unlike any other.
“I was changing as an artist and as a creative person. And all that was evident when the No Shoes album came out, and that’s when my life exploded,” Kenny said.
He described the burst of energy injected into his shows by his fan community, known as “No Shoes Nation.”
“It’s like an out-of-body experience,” he said. “You’re so connected to a group of people, it’s like an avalanche that you can’t stop.”
Kenny, whose new book Heart Life Music has topped the New York Times bestseller lists, said being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in October was a career highlight.
“It didn’t really hit me until I walked into the rotunda that night and we took a group picture of all the living members, and I was in the picture,” Kenny said of the honor. “And for me to have my face right there on that wall in this rotunda with a lot of the people that were the best of the best, it means everything to me.”
“I know there’s a lot of kids out there that have that same dream that they don’t even know what it is yet. And I am proof that extraordinary things can happen to an ordinary person, I promise you.”
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