Nashville, TN. (Top40 Charts/ RCA) - With 'Never
Wanted Nothing More' holding down the No 1 spot on Billboard's Country Singles chart for the third straight week - landing at the top of the country radio chart seven short weeks after add date - it's obvious that the first new music from
Kenny Chesney in two years is something the fans want to hear. And when writers Preston Jones and Cary Darling decided to write a response to a New York Times piece lamenting the notion that Songs of the Summer were dead, the Fort Worth Star-Gazette critics reached straight for the Luttrell, Tennessean's latest to make their point.
'Skipping the rum-chugging beach-bum act for something more earnest and old-school, Chesney reaches back to a misspent youth on this single from his forthcoming release, Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates,' the entry reads. 'In his smooth baritone, the superstar reminisces about driving around with the fellas and that special someone he met one fateful summer.'
The only country act on the list, Chesney is joined by the Plain White T's, Fall-Out Boy, Justin Timberlake, Rhianna, Sean Kingston, Maroon 5, Mark Ronson (with Amy Winehouse), Avril Lavigne and Silverchair. In taking up the case for the summer song in a nationally syndicated piece headlined 'The Sounds of Summer: These 10 Cool Hits Are The Seasons Shore Thing Songs,' Jones and Darling opined, 'you can't ignore the fact that a few songs have defiantly lodged themselves atop the charts this season, and they're tunes that do, in fact, evoke the lazy days of summer.'
'I think a lot of what I do is about the summer,' concurs the triple and reigning Academy of Country Music and two-time and current Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year. 'So it's nice when a song connects. To me, everything in this song is everything that summer's all about - that idea that you want something so bad, you can taste it, and when you get it, it's even better than you thought it could be.'
With Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates arriving in-stores Sept. 11, Chesney continues his full-tilt Flip Flop Summer concert tour - presented by Cruzan Rum - that was just named the No 1 most attended country concert tour by Pollstar. Having already played 5 NFL stadiums - Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Seattle, the man who kicked off his tour in SEC college bars and Key West dives hits the Midwest this week and Rollins into Detroit 's Ford Field, where the Lions play, on August 18th.
'The response to this single has been incredible,' Chesney says, 'I cut it 'cause it was very real to me in my life, growing up… I could remember wanting that first car, that first girl… and when I look out in the crowd every night, I see a lot of faces that I figure are feeling those same things, too. It's pretty cool to be on a list with a bunch of records I'm hearing coming out of all the other kind of radio formats… It means our music's getting heard, too, and that's a pretty good feeling… almost as good as the energy that hits that stage every night when the scrim drops and we see that crowd.'
