How's this for odd: A pretty good story on country music -- yes, country music -- in the New York Times?
So good that we're passing it along. Good timing too, since Chesney's new album's out this week, we're told.
THE KING OF COUNTRY CASUAL, BACK AGAIN
By KELEFA SANNEH
New York Times
Kenny Chesney is one of the biggest pop stars in the United States, and he works hard to appear laid-back. Like Jimmy Buffett before him (and, occasionally, with Buffett alongside him), he sings about vacations and weekends, beaches and bars. And for the last few months he has been filling up arenas on his Flip-Flop Summer tour, after the song of the same title, which describes a typical day in Chesneyland: “Mix us up some strong libations/No worries, just good vibrations.”
All right, so maybe the song’s other lyrics don’t quite add up; surely summer isn’t the ideal time to “cruise down to Montego.” But then, Chesney’s version of paradise is always out of reach: too perfect or long gone or just around the corner. That’s what gives many of his songs the wistful undercurrent that makes them memorable.
With his last studio album, “The Road and the Radio,” from 2005, Chesney hinted at the restlessness beneath all this wishful thinking. In “Living in Fast Forward,” one of three No.1 country hits from that album, he sang, “I’ve been living in fast forward/Now I need to rewind real slow.” He sounded a little bit like a man who needed a vacation from his permanent vacation.
And in the second verse he sounded envious when he sang about his bourgeois friends: “They work in their office and drive SUVs/They pray for their babies and they worry ’bout me.” While his fans were dreaming of living his life, he was dreaming of living theirs.
That notion — improbable but somehow sweet — animates Chesney’s new album, which is being released today and has one of the worst titles he has ever come up with, along with some of the best music. It’s called “Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates” (BNA/Sony BMG Nashville), but it might as well have been called “Just Who They Are.” Instead of chronicling a swashbuckling life, Chesney pays affectionate tribute to the landlubbers who buy his CDs.
The first single is “Never Wanted Nothing More,” a cheerful blast of small-c conservatism that has already topped Billboard’s country chart. With a banjo peeking out from amid the electric guitars, Chesney unspools a down-home highlight reel, reminiscing about moments that changed him. Two — a wedding and a religious rebirth — take place in church; suffice it to say that the third takes place “down by the river, with a $6 bottle of wine.” In the chorus he professes total contentment, singing, “I never wanted nothing more.”
It’s probably impossible not to hear that song against the backdrop of Chesney’s own ambition. He tours nonstop, and this is his fifth CD (including a live album) in four years; if there’s any country singer who always seems hungry for more, it’s this one.
It’s probably impossible, too, not to hear the song against the backdrop of Chesney’s recent romantic history. In 2005 he married the actress Renee Zellweger; the marriage was annulled ( Zellweger famously cited “fraud” as the reason) later that year. Far from undermining the message, these complications strengthen it, letting listeners draw their own conclusions from the gap between the life in the lyrics and the life of the guy delivering them.
Chesney isn’t a very prolific songwriter, and he doesn’t get any writing credits at all on the new album, but he certainly has a knack for finding songs that fit both his voice and his persona. The second single from this album is already making its way up the country chart, and it’s a ballad with the same message: Life is pretty good. The portentousness of the first verse — an old man is asked for “the secret to life” — is neatly deflated by the chorus, which revolves around the affable credo that’s also the title: “Don’t Blink.”
Fans and Cruzan Rum executives (the company sponsors his tour) needn’t worry: There are drinking songs here, including “Wild Ride,” which evokes big-budget 1980s rock ’n’ roll at its most tiresome. Most of the time, though, Chesney avoids the spirit of forced revelry that often infects his albums and — more acutely — his live show.
“Just Not Today” is a song about settling down (he’ll do it “one of these days — just not today”), and “Scare Me” deftly updates a recent hit. On the last album he sang, “Baby, you save me.” Now it’s, “Youuu scare me,” and he extends that first word as if he’s trying to avoid the last two.
One of the most jolly-sounding songs is also the most perverse. “Shiftwork” uses a faux-calypso beat as the basis for an ode to menial labor. The refrain goes, “Workin’ 7 to 3, 3 to 11, 11 to 7.” Past the complaints about the boss and the customers, you can hear a glimmer of reflected pride. You can also hear George Strait, a master of vocal understatement, appearing as a guest. Compared with this wry veteran, Chesney sounds the way he looks: like a kid, earnest and eager.
Too eager, sometimes. Somehow no one prevented him from recording “Dancin’ for the Groceries,” a singularly maudlin song about someone who earns her salary one sweaty dollar at a time. As a portrait of a young woman making hard decisions, this is both condescending and disingenuous. (You imagine that if Chesney were visiting this woman in her workplace, he’d be in a markedly less pensive mood.)
But maybe the lyrics are more revealing than they first seem. Imagine that this hard-working mother isn’t a mother at all. Imagine that those are tight jeans, instead of panties, and replace the pasties with a sleeveless shirt. Make her a him, add a cowboy hat and you’ve got a much more interesting character: an aging party boy, singing for his supper while dreaming about the workaday lives of the fans who pay his bills.
