Nashville, TN (SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT) - With his The Road & The
Radio Tour doing unprecedented ticket-office-slamming business - and a plethora of 2nd shows needing to be added, in some cases within mere moments - Kenny Chesney's decided to stadium-size some of his biggest markets, starting with Boston's Gillette Field, where the New England Patriots play. The July 16th stop on his 2006 tour features this year's tour mate Dierks Bentley, last year's tour mate Gretchen Wilson, her Muzik Mafia buddies
Big & Rich and stunning newcomer Carrie Underwood.
'We can over think this stuff... be sure we've got the demand met... and then we keep finding we're scrambling,' says the man who has played to over one million fans each of the past four years. 'My whole attitude has always been the more, the merrier - and if you wanna come be part of the fun'n'the music, then come on... It's why we try to keep the tickets affordable, why we do as many dates as we do. Once we put our tickets up on sale for the first several dates - and saw how fast some of the markets were going clean, we realized we might need to rethink some of the second leg.'
To that end, Chesney will not only return to Foxboro, Massachusetts this summer, but he'll be performing in eight additional football and soccer stadiums - making him the only country artist to headline stadiums this year. Look for dates to be announced in Nashville, Seattle, Detroit, Tampa, Dallas, Chicago, Columbus and Los Angeles shortly.
'When we started headlining back in 2001, it was pretty awesome - because I got to create exactly the show I wanted, to try and make it be everything I loved seeing,' says the reigning Academy of Country Music Entertainer of the Year. 'And every year since, I've been able to dream bigger, to come up with all kinds of cool things... and just when I think it can't get any better, we get out there and those fans are even louder, even happier to be there... and it sends me back to the bus to figure out what can we do next year?!
'I never thought we'd get to the place where we'd have 19 semis, so thinking about 5 National Football League football stadiums and 4 Major League Soccer stadiums is beyond me. I mean, I'm the kind who worked his butt off to make the football team at Gibbs High School, so the idea that I'm playing in these places, walking the same halls and hanging in the same locker rooms as these major athletes is its own crazy reality.'
'Living In Fast Forward,' the revved up David Lee Murphy/Rivers Rutherford rave-up about the momentum of being 'a hillbilly rock star,' sits at No 1 on Billboard's Country Singles chart 8 short weeks after its official add date. It's the second single from Chesney's The Road & The Radio, certified double platinum 6 weeks after release; meanwhile the tour of the same name to kick-off with a double March 23/24 at the Nutter Center in Dayton, Ohio.
