Kenny Chesney and Megan Moroney have a Top 30 hit with “You Had To Be There.” The song was written by Moroney, as a gift to Chesney, after he invited her to open for him on his 2024 Sun Goes Down Tour. Although heartfelt, Moroney admits she was nervous showing it to Chesney, and even more nervous asking him to sing on it with her.

“There were definitely some Pain Killers involved — which, Pain Killers are a St. John’s drink,” Moroney reveals to Taste of Country. “I’m not talking about taking pain killers.”

“I was planning on showing it to him before we went to dinner, all of us,” she continues. “Once we got there, he’s like, ‘You’re being so weird.'”

Thanks to the bit of liquid courage Moroney had, she unceremoniously presented the song to her former tour boss.

“I was like, ‘Um, I wrote you a song. Here you go!'” she recalls, giving him an immediate out if he didn’t like “You Had To Be There.”

“‘We don’t have to cut it if you hate it,'” she recounts telling him. “‘I don’t wanna make you feel weird, I promise.'”

Fortunately, Chesney loved the song, and agreed to sing on it with her.

“We played it like eight times in a row.,” Chesney recalls, while talking about the song with Moroney. “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.”

Chesney has invited plenty of artists to open for him. But few, if any, have forged the bond that he and Moroney now share.

“It was just little by little, every week,” Chesney says of their friendship. “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.”

“You Had To Be There” is very autobiographical for Moroney, who was first a massive fan of Chesney, before becoming his close friend.

“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.’”

As for Chesney, he will likely never get over the once-in-a-lifetime gift Moroney gave him.

“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,” Chesney 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.”