Trivia / Kenny Chesney

• Black Sheep Hit: He has three typical modes: beachy Jimmy Buffett-esque tunes, introspective acoustic ballads, or arena rock. His two biggest hits, "The Good Stuff" and "There Goes My Life", are none of the above. (They're still ballads, but in a markedly different and more mainstream style from his usual ballads such as "Down the Road" or "You and Tequila".)
• Breakthrough Hit: "She's Got It All" (1997) was his first #1 on Billboard and the song that helped kick-start his career. A couple years later, "How Forever Feels" pushed him from rapidly-ascending second-tier to A-lister.
• Chart Displacement:
  • While many of his #1 hits have been forgotten, "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" and "I Go Back" remain among his most popular with peaks of #11 and #2. His version of Mac McAnally's 1990 hit "Back Where I Come From" appears to have eclipsed the original, even though Mac's version was a single (reaching #14 in 1990) and Kenny's was not. This is due to Chesney's being a longtime staple of his concerts, and a live version appearing on his first Greatest Hits Album.
  • This is also true on the Hot 100, where his highest peaks are "Out Last Night" (#16) and "The Boys of Fall" (#18). The former was a lead single to a Greatest Hits Album that faded out after initial buzz, while the latter got an unexpected boost from the start of high school football season but did not endure.
• Follow-Up Failure: Occurred with the singles off Songs for the Saints in 2018: lead single "Get Along" went to #1 with ease, but the followup "Better Boat" stalled at #24, snapping a 51-song streak of Top 20 hits and accounting for his worst-perfoming single since 1998.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Two promotional football themed singles — "Touchdown Tennessee" and "Team of Destiny" — were released in 1998 and 1999 respectively. The former was a charity single dedicated to longtime University of Tennessee Volunteers radio announcer John Ward, and the latter was a tribute to the team itself. "Team of Destiny" was pulled from rotation after only a couple weeks due to a policy from the NCAA prohibiting the use of college football player names for commercial purposes. As a result, there are no copies of it anywhere online.
• Production Posse: Since Everywhere We Go, he has been produced by Buddy Cannon. He has also included guitarist Kenny Greenberg on nearly every album released in the 21st century, and nearly all of his music videos since "Young" have been directed by Shaun Silva.
• Uncredited Role: He was not credited for his duet vocals on Reba McEntire's "Every Other Weekend". Label disagreements resulted in the official radio edit replacing Kenny's vocals with those of writer Skip Ewing, but most stations played the Chesney version anyway.
• What Could Have Been: Tim McGraw recorded "How Forever Feels" around the same time that Kenny did, but chose not to put it on an album. Tim himself would later say that this was for the better.
  • Tim later did release his version on his 2016 compilation, McGraw: The Ultimate Collection.
• Working Title: Cosmic Hallelujah was originally supposed to be titled Some Town Somewhere.

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