Kenny Chesney and Megan Moroney are opening up about their “You Had to Be There” duet, out on Friday, May 9. The song was written by Moroney for Chesney, as a Christmas gift, trying to convey what it meant to her to join him on his Sun Goes Down Tour

“We played it like eight times in a row.,” Chesney recalls, while chatting with Moroney about the song. “And I couldn’t believe it, because it was a true postcard, if you will, of everything we experienced on the road. The ups, the downs, the Miami trip, all of it. And the thing about it is, I didn’t know Megan when we first started on the road. I went to breakfast one time with her. I felt like, if I’m gonna be on the road with Megan all summer, I need to meet her before the first show. We met, and that was like in February, and I didn’t see her again until April.”

As soon as Chesney and Moroney hit the road, their bond became close, growing closer as the tour progressed.

“It was just little by little, every week,” Chesney says. “Megan, along with her whole road crew, we just became really great friends. And you never know if that’s going to happen or not. So when you hear someone that went out on the road with you, that cared so much about it, and cared so much about the experience, and what it meant to them to be up there on stage. But the thing about Megan and her crew, after she got off stage and before she was onstage, they were all on the side of the stage, soaking it all in.”

Chesney is still in awe that Moroney gave him such a thoughtful gift, which for him he says is a first.

“To care about the friendship that much, to sit down and give me a piece of their heart and a piece of their soul, that we, in turn, together, get to give the world. I think that’s a very special thing,” the 57-year-old says. “And as far as I know, nobody has ever written a song for me, and if that’s true, I’m really glad that ‘You Had To Be There’ is the first one. I absolutely love it.”

Moroney admits it wasn’t an easy task to sit down and pen a song for someone she had admired for so long. She held onto the song until the first of the year, when she joined Chesney at his island home.

“It sounds like a Kenny Chesney song, and it’s just really authentic to the story of what happened,” Moroney says. “The first verse is me getting ready for the concert in 2018. I was a sophomore in college when I went and saw him in Atlanta. The second verse comes around and says, ‘Seven years later, got a different point of view,’ which obviously, seven years later, I was on tour with Kenny Chesney. I said on stage every night that it was such a full-circle moment. We all loved the song. I had no idea if Kenny was going to like the song, but I was like, ‘I’m gonna write it down on a piece of paper, and that will be my gift to him, and I’ll play it for him when we get there.'”

“You Had To Be There” will be available on May 9 at MeganMoroney.com.