Megan Moroney‘s “You Had To Be There” duet with Kenny Chesney is out! Moroney penned the song to Chesney as a Christmas gift, and a way to thank him for inviting her to join him on his massive Sun Goes Down Tour last year.

“As y’all know, I write about things that are important to me, and the Sun Goes Down Tour and becoming friends with Kenny Chesney last summer was undoubtedly a highlight of my career and my life,” Moroney explains on social media. “I wrote out the lyrics and gifted this song to him for Christmas and thankfully he loved it.”

Chesney commented on her post, expressing his appreciation for the heartwarming, and deeply personal, present.

“What a gift, Megan,” Chesney writes. “You are one of the most thoughtful humans I’ve met. So excited for everyone to hear it.”

 

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Chesney knew as soon as Moroney asked him that he wanted to be included on “You Had To Be There.”

“Nobody has more fun, works harder, is more creative – or pranked me harder than Megan,” says Chesney. “When she called to see if I’d sing on her song, a song she said she wrote about me, I paused. Nobody’s ever written a song about me, but nobody’s ever ridden a tiny child’s tractor down my T wearing my clothes before, either.

“The answer was always going to be yes,” he adds. “But what a great thing to sing on a song so well-written, with so much heart and so in the moment. Being out with Megan last year, she really does pack it all into every single thing she does. With her, you do have to be there.”

When the collaboration was announced, Chesney said he was blown away by the gift.

“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.”

“You Had To Be There” begins with Moroney recounting when she bought tickets to go see Chesney perform in 2018, unaware that she would end up opening for him several years later.

“It sounds like a Kenny Chesney song, and it’s just really authentic to the story of what happened,” Moroney says of the song. “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,” she adds. “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.’”

The fact that Moroney not only got to tour with Chesney, but now counts him among her closest friends, is almost more than Moroney can comprehend. Almost.

“When I go on stage with Kenny Chesney in a stadium and I sing with him? I grew up listening to him,” Moroney reflects to People . “And we sing ‘You and Tequila’ and ‘All the Pretty Girls’ together every night and those moments still surprise me every week. Or I’ll be side stage and I literally turn around and I’m like, ‘Holy crap, that’s Kenny Chesney.’ And I’m literally friends with him.”

Photo Credit: CeCe Dawson