Nashville, TN. (Top40 Charts/ BNA Entertainment) - When you're busy bringing the summer to the nation's heartland, it can get a little tricky trying to find time to schedule your own party. But when the event is to celebrate your very first solely-written No 1 single - like say Kenny Chesney's 'Beer In Mexico' - even the back-to-back and reigning Academy of Country
Music and two-time and current Country
Music Association Entertainer of the Year will make the effort to find time. Even if it happens nearly two months after the three week No 1 peaked.
'There are some events in our life that are just that important,' says the very busy Kenny Chesney, who's been flipping the seasonal switch in the Midwest with his Flip-Flop Summer. 'For a guy who came to Nashville and had no idea how it worked and was lucky enough to get signed to Acuff Rose all those years ago… and spent all those hours with the great songwriters, having lunch, trying to learn from them… having a No 1 record that I wrote on my own is a whole other kind of thing.'
Not that Chesney hasn't written several hits with some of Nashville best writers and his close friends. As a man who believes in recording the best songs possible - it puts his songs in some pretty fierce company. And when the CMA Album of the Year When The Sun Goes Down's 'I Go Back' spent a heartbreaking 8 weeks at No 2, it made the goal of a wholly written No 1 that much more elusive.
'It was funny,' he concedes about the weekly watch for this distinction two years ago. 'Every week towards the end seemed like maybe… and that song was such a piece of me, too. You know, it was about how those certain songs always put me right back in those moments….any time I hear them… and that's what makes songs and music so powerful! All you have to do is hear a little bit, and you remember everything about how you felt, how things smelled, the way the light was…'
If 'Beer In Mexico' doesn't have the emotional charge of a song that celebrates his free-spirited youth, Grandma's church and a friend who died too young, it packs a truth-in-celebratory-free-fall to it.
'There's a real fantasy element to writing a song at Sammy Hagar's pool,' laughs the man who rocked 1.3 million fans last year. 'When you're growing up listening to him in your truck, you don't think one day you'll be sitting at his pool writing a song… and that's what happened! When he invited us down to play his birthday in Cabo (San Lucas), we were psyched - and it was a party, too!
'But there's a moment when you're just sitting there, thinking about all of it - your life, your craziest dreams, what you want… out of that a song can spill out. Everybody decided to go out on the water, fishing, but I could feel a song coming, so I stayed home. Right about now, I'm sure glad I did.'
With blaring brass and that freewheeling beat, the musing on removing the pressure to decide all the big issues became a kickstart as winter melted off this year - and for Chesney, who performs on the Academy of Country Music Awards where he is an Entertainer of the Year win would put him in an elite group of 3-time Entertainers, his first No 1 written by himself wasn't a one- or two-week chart-topper, it was 3 weeks… a formidable feat from an album that had multiple week No 1s with 'Livin' In Fast Forward' and 'Summertime.'
