Over 40,000 fans packed into a cool Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Saturday night to see Kenny Chesney and his 2011 Goin’ Coastal Tour.
For over two hours, Chesney shrunk a huge stage in the south end zone with a tireless performance where he stayed in constant motion, with fans getting a large dose of his 21 No. 1 hits, as well as a handful of cover songs.
Keeping with Packers tradition, during the afternoon the parking lot was filled with tailgaters who warmed up by lounging in lawn chairs, grilling and playing touch football games. Despite the overcast skies, there were shirtless fans in shorts rather than parkas.
During the song, “Boys of Fall,” Chesney was joined onstage with Coach McCarthy and the Lombardi Trophy.
As promised, Kenny Chesney sat down this week with Ray Waddell from Billboard for a question and answer session at their Country Music Summit in Nashville.
Chesney discussed how he got into country music, what he did when he first moved to Nashville, his early touring days, and several other topics.
The 2011 CMT Music Awards, hosted by Kid Rock, air tonight live from Nashville at 8 pm ET. Kenny Chesney is nominated for two awards, including the top honor: Video of the Year.
The finalists for Video of the Year will be announced at the beginning of the show, and then you’ll be able to vote throughout the show for your favorite. So if Kenny makes it into the finalists, be sure to vote for him at CMT.com!
Here’s who Kenny is up against:
Video of the Year
Jason Aldean – “My Kinda Party”
Kenny Chesney – “The Boys of Fall”
Lady Antebellum – “Hello World”
Miranda Lambert – “The House That Built Me”
Rascal Flatts – “Why Wait”
Sugarland – “Stuck Like Glue”
Taylor Swift – “Mine”
The Band Perry – “If I Die Young”
Carrie Underwood – “Undo It”
Zac Brown Band – “Colder Weather”
Male Video of the Year
Jason Aldean – “My Kinda Party”
Kenny Chesney – “The Boys of Fall”
Toby Keith – “Bullets in the Gun”
Blake Shelton – “Who Are You When I’m Not Looking”
The Washington Post has a good review of Kenny Chesney’s DC-area concert on Saturday night where he played to 50,000 fans.
Think of Kenny Chesney as the anti-Bono.
Times are tough. People are suffering. The world has many problems. “But we don’t gotta solve a single one of ’em tonight,” Chesney declared Saturday night at FedEx Field, on his triumphant return to the touring circuit.
The country superstar does his requisite share of offstage charity work, but onstage he’s about providing one thing: escape.
No, that wasn’t a guilty conscience you were feeling — that was a beach ball hitting the side of your head.
When the lights went down and Chesney’s band began chugging, the man himself was nowhere to be found. “Where is he?” went thousands of circling heads. (Hint: Look for chiseled biceps and a sleeveless shirt.)
After a few bars of “Live a Little” (sample lyric: “Take some time / waste it on number one”), Chesney sprang up from the tangle of audiovisual equipment in the round, suspended in a kind of ski-lift chair.
Alison Bonaguro at CMT talked with Grace Potter about Kenny Chesney and the music video for “You and Tequila.”
She told me yesterday (June 2) that when she and Chesney were recording the song and making the video, she found him “so devoted to his craft.”
She added, “He has an incredible amount of depth, and is so diverse as a musician. He’s capable of anything,” she added. Chesney discovered her soulful, folk-rock band, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, when he heard their 2007 song “Apologies.” So his people called her people, a demo was sent and voila. Written by Matraca Berg and Deana Carter, “You and Tequila” is a poignant song that compares love to a vice. (Chesney has said he loved the song because it’s about being addicted to a person and how that can run in your blood.)
Chesney and Potter shot the sexy video mostly in Malibu, Calif. “That’s the essence of the song, a very romantic setting. And the house where we shot it really lent itself to the song. It was built to look like a Spanish villa, like it belonged on Majorca in the Mediterranean.” On set, Potter said Chesney was very involved. “He and Shaun (Silva, the director) have this kind of shorthand. Kenny even ran around with his own camera. And he’s so well-versed in videos. Even though that’s not his job to know all that, he does know it,” she said. “I was a bit of a film nerd as a kid. So I was obsessed with angles and lighting, too.”
CMT has a great writeup on Kenny Chesney’s longtime producer Buddy Cannon, and how the two came together:
[Chesney] had just signed a publishing deal with Acuff-Rose, whose offices were across the street from Mercury’s offices, over there on 17th Avenue,” Cannon explains.
“I knew Kenny as a rookie songwriter. He would walk across the street and hang out in our lobby, shooting the breeze with our receptionist. He’d be in there every day, once or twice a day. … I had no idea he was trying to be an artist.
“One day, he came in and asked me if he could see me in my office for a minute. He told me he’d just gotten signed with Capricorn Records, and he said, ‘I would love for you and Norro to produce my first album.’”
Cannon says he knew that couldn’t happen, given Shedd’s restriction.
“So I had to tell him no, which killed me,” he said.
Barry Beckett was then hired as Chesney’s producer and helmed the young artist’s first two albums.
Cannon says it gradually became clear to him that he would have to leave Mercury if he was ever going to get back to his goal of producing.
“So I quit,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’m outta here. I’m getting nowhere in the direction I want to go.’ I went to Warner/Chappell. They gave me a publishing deal that would give me the ability to financially survive for a couple of years.
“Maybe a month or two months after I quit, I got a phone call from Renee [Bell] over at RCA. She said Kenny [who had by then signed to the RCA Label Group's BNA label] wanted her to ask me and Norro if we’d be interested in producing his next record. … That was about 1995.”
Over 40,000 fans packed into a cool Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Saturday night to see Kenny Chesney and his 2011 Goin’ Coastal Tour.
As 
The 2011 CMT Music Awards, hosted by Kid Rock, air tonight live from Nashville at 8 pm ET. Kenny Chesney is nominated for two awards, including the top honor: Video of the Year.
The Washington Post has a 
Alison Bonaguro at CMT 
This morning Kenny Chesney will debut the new music video for “You and Tequila” on CMT at 10:45 am ET / 9:45 am CT.
CMT has a great 
