In another preview of Kenny Chesney’s upcoming In The Spotlight interview with ABC, Kenny Chesney takes us behind the scenes with his flying stadium chair:

See the first preview from In The Spotlight here.

“In the Spotlight with Robin Roberts: All Access Nashville” airs Tuesday, November 8th at 10pm ET on the ABC Television Network.

Next Tuesday, ABC’s Robin Roberts hosts In The Spotlight: All Access Nashville which will give viewers an hour-long look into the homes and private lives of country music’s biggest stars.

Here’s a preview of the Kenny Chesney portion:

“In the Spotlight with Robin Roberts: All Access Nashville” airs Tuesday, November 8th at 10pm ET on the ABC Television Network.

Kenny Chesney is in New York City this weekend for a show at the Meadowlands and he made time to sit down with the New York Times for an interview on “Kenny Chesney, Inc.”

Here are some excerpts. Be sure to read the full interview here.

Q. So, you’re the C.E.O., in effect, of Kenny Chesney Inc. How big is the business?

A. I have 120 employees on the road every day, and about 30 other employees off the road. I remember being on the bus a couple years ago, and I looked out the window of my bus and said to myself: Who’s paying for this? And it hit me: You are! I was in charge of making sure that we get from Point A to Point B, that we all do it seamlessly and that we all do it effectively, and we all do it on time.

Q. So how do you make that real — everybody should have respect for everyone else — rather than just a slogan?

A. I want all the people out there who work with me to feel as appreciated as possible, especially the people who are the first to get up in the morning and the last to go to bed — my crew guys. Sometimes we do a “merch” lottery. We put everybody’s name in a huge sombrero and whoever’s name I pull out gets all of the money from merchandise sales for that night.

Q. How much money could that be from the merchandise?

A. Probably the biggest check was three hundred grand. But do you know what those guys did? This is why I think this kind of thing works: They waited until the end of the year and I wrote one big check to the crew and they divided it up 13 ways. Doing things like that just motivates people.

Q. What else do you do?

A. At the end of each year, I take the band, crew, the merchandise people, catering people, my management team, their wives, girlfriends, whatever, down to the Virgin Islands for a week to thank them. I pay for everything, and we’ve done it every year since 2002.

Not very many country acts sell 40,000+ tickets in New York City, but Kenny Chesney has done just that with his upcoming show at the Meadowland Stadium:

Chesney has already sold more than 44,000 tickets, making it the hottest single paid country show in the New York City-New Jersey area since Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard and Linda Ronstadt drew more than 51,000 in 1983.

“I don’t know if taking a chance is the right word, but to be honest with you it was a little bit of a risk to play Meadowlands Stadium,” Chesney said. “But my whole touring life has been a risk. … One day I said, ‘You know, I want to be able to say I played the New York-New Jersey area and I did it in a football stadium.’ We almost did it two years ago, and so now I felt like the time was right. I’m glad I was right.”

Playing against the odds is paying off. The greater New York metropolitan area has traditionally been a no-fly zone for country artists. But Chesney is matching artists like Jon Bon Jovi stride for stride in his home state and with other artists like Taylor Swift— who recently played in front of 52,000 fans in four sold-out arena shows in Newark, N.J. — is helping show there’s room for a little twang in the shadow of the Big Apple.

Meadowlands CEO Mark Lamping expects Chesney’s show with Zac Brown Band, Billy Currington and Uncle Kracker to sell out at around 50,000 and notes the show could clear the way for more major country acts to play a market they once wrote off.

“We’ve always believed in the show,” Lamping said. “We were perhaps a little anxious in the beginning because there hasn’t been a big (country) show here in a long time. But we were confident this would be a success and it’s been a success beyond what our original expectations were. It certainly gives us a lot of confidence to bring other shows to this market.”

The Boot has a great writeup of an interview that Kenny did with Billboard recently, where he details some of the bumps in the road to the top of country music:

“We all get caught up in the idea of, ‘We want this now,’ and I was no different,” Kenny recalls to Billboard of his anxious early days in the business. “I had a few hit records, and there were other people having hit records and they were getting paid $2500 more than I was getting paid … I remember talking to [my manager] Dale Morris going, ‘Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that? Why isn’t this happening?’ That mentality was one of the reasons that we’re doing what we’re doing today. That taught me patience and that everybody is in this together, and we’re going to take this and make it wonderful and not just live for the moment. Dale called it: ‘We’re betting on what’s to come, not what’s right now.’ And that’s hard. When you’re a kid, you want it all right now.”

Kenny soon channeled his energy into making his live show “something special.” “Whether it worked or whether it didn’t, I was going to do it,” he said. “It wasn’t safe and it wasn’t probably the smartest thing to do, but it was the smartest thing to do for me. I got a taste of the George Strait stadium tours and I was going to do whatever it takes.”

Be sure to read the rest of the article here.

The latest issue of Men’s Health details Kenny Chesney’s workout routine, and how he hired a personal trainer in 2001 to get him into shape to produce the most high-energy shows in music:

Ten minutes. That’s all the time country music star Kenny Chesney needs to pump out 300 pushups. It’s a staggering number, especially when you consider it’s more than most can do in an hour. (Just try it.)

But his secret is simple: vision and focus. In fact, it’s this same clear vision and laser focus that took Chesney from singing for tips in Nashville bars back in the early 90s to landing his fourth consecutive Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year award last December. And all along, his fit, lean body has been a key part of his plan.

By 2001, Chesney had accumulated five number one singles. Only he longed not to be a country music star, but a country music brand. And that meant he needed to be the ultimate entertainer, in every aspect. That’s when he hired personal trainer Daniel Meng, owner of MUV Fitness Coaching in Nashville, Tennessee. Meng’s charge: to help the singer take his stage performance to an all-new level.

While Chesney was already in good shape, he needed to transform physically to put on what now would be the highest-energy concert in all of music. “I have to train to do my show the way I want to do it,” he says. “I’m not one of these guys that just stands there behind the microphone. I work really hard to give the fans the best possible concert.” The effort has paid off: Chesney has grossed approximately $500 million from concert ticket sales during the past 10 years.

Read the full article and interview here.

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.

Watch below:

According to The Boot, Kenny Chesney is in the June issue of Boating Magazine, where he discusses his boats and love of boating.

he recorded a song titled ‘Boats’ for his ‘Lucky Old Sun’ album, and it includes the lines, “vessels of freedom/harbors of healing,” which is very apropos to how he feels when he’s riding the waves.

“That line came from a gentleman and his daughter I met in St. Croix,” Kenny explains in the June issue of Boating magazine. “I think anybody who has a boat has an emotional attachment to it. It has a way of healing a person and gives him a sense of freedom. That’s where I feel the most freedom — and it’s helped me heal something that needed healing.”

Kenny currently has two Sea Rays, a 56- and a 60-footer, although he admits he’s a little bit more fond of the 60-foot boat. One of his favorite boating memories is right after he purchased his first vessel.

“My manager and some buddies and I left Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., says the superstar. “The idea was to drive as far as we could toward the Virgin Islands. We made it farther, all the way to Georgetown in the Cayman Islands. It was a very peaceful time, [and] I had a lot of people I loved with me.”

Kenny Chesney is in California this weekend as part of the Goin’ Coastal Tour and on Thursday night he sat down for a back-and-forth at the Grammy Museum as part of their ongoing program with musicians.

The exclusive event was held in the intimate Clive Davis Theater and included a discussion of Chesney’s road to success, how his creative process works, and the details of his recent year off from touring.

Chesney began by speaking of his first musical memories, which were centered around family and church. He mentioned, however, that while music was always a part of his life, it was never in the forefront.

Rather, he was focused on athletics and dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player – as made evident by his constant use of sports analogies throughout the conversation.

Chesney mentioned that he was actually playing a game of pick-up-basketball when he heard “Take It to the Limit” by The Eagles for the first time, citing the song as his first introduction to harmonies and great music in general. That experience inspired him to pursue music further, and he learned to play guitar his junior year of college.

Today, all of Chesney’s college roommates are on the road with him for his “Goin’ Coastal” tour, just as they have been for the past eighteen years of touring. He spoke of the long way that his self-titled “road family” has come since the first year on tour, during which fourteen band members – including Chesney himself – had to take turns sleeping in the twelve beds on their bus.

That memory prompted him to speak of the way in which artists gain success so quickly today, pointing out that young singers now get a new tour bus for every song they release. “It concerns me a little bit today,” said Chesney, “that the idea of the singer-songwriter isn’t that important. I always loved the people who wrote their own music and went out there and performed.”

Among the artists who he admires, Chesney mentioned Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Jimmy Buffett, Tom Petty, John Cougar Mellencamp and, most importantly, Bruce Springstein.

Robert Santelli pointed out that during Springstien’s visit to the GRAMMY Museum, the celebrated musician explained the three things necessary for an artist to be successful: the ability to be a great listener, a keen attention to detail, and a commitment to honesty.

Chesney agreed, and went on to explain the most important advice his idol ever gave to him. “Bruce told me that you can write half a song and put it in a drawer. In five years you can pull it out and it will still be there. Life’s not like that – you have to live life. You can’t put it in a drawer.”

Be sure to read the full writeup here.