Welcome to Kenny Chesney’s fishbowl. The superstar is letting fans peak behind the curtain on his latest album, which is his most mature and revealing project to date. He’s marking yesterday’s release of Welcome To The Fishbowl with a huge live-streaming beach concert tonight (6/20), and Saturday (6/23) he’s bringing the party to Nashville’s LP Field with pal Tim McGraw.
Tonight’s event pairs Chesney with renowned filmmaker Jonathan Demme who will direct the 75-minute online concert as part of the American Express Unstaged series. Demme, the man behind the lens of Academy Award winning movies Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, will shoot the largest concert ever held on the shores of Wildwood, NJ, a vacation destination with a classic boardwalk, roller coasters and ferris wheel. Watching in person will be 20,000-plus fans, mostly American Express Cardmembers, who received free tickets.
The show will be livestreamed at 8:30 PM ET / 5:30 PM PT at www.YouTube.com/KennyChesneyVEVO, on VEVO’s mobile apps, VEVO Xbox Live app, and the YouTube mobile website. The performance will be rebroadcast for 12 hours.
To encourage social media chatter, fans at the concert in Wildwood and those enjoying the livestream will be able to unlock special enhancements to the show with the increasing number of tweets posted during the performance using designated hashtags.
Others who have participated in Unstaged include Sugarland, who collaborated with Kenny Ortega, and a recent pairing of Jack White and Gary Oldman.
Also this week, Chesney will perform on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (6/21), and Today’s Toyota Summer Concert Series (6/22). He and Katy Perry will take the stage on Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular on NBC.
On Saturday Chesney and Tim McGraw’s Brothers of the Sun tour takes over LP Field for a rockin’ event featuring guests Jake Owen and Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. Chesney’s new album also includes a duet with McGraw, “Feel Like a Rock Star,” but the singer says the party-hearty track stands in contrast to the rest of the collection. Among the vulnerable ballads are “Sing ‘Em Good My Friend,” “Always Gonna Be You,” and “El Cerrito Place.” The latter, penned by Keith Gattis, features background vocals by Potter, who helped make “You and Tequila” a hit. The album, being released via Blue Chair Records/Columbia Nashville, is bookended by intimate tracks “Come Over” and “Always Gonna Be You.”
Chesney, whose sales tally exceeds 30 million units, explains, “There are songs on here I might not have had courage enough to put on a record in the past, but now I feel like it’s essential that I do these kinds of things at this point in my career. I want to be honest with my fans and myself as a songwriter and a creative person. I feel like now, more than ever, I’m comfortable with being authentic, wherever that leads me. I want to take my music and my audience and dig a little deeper, and see if they’ll come along with me.”
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Sarah Skates has worked in the music business for more than a decade and is a longtime contributor to MusicRow.View Author Profile
