Kenny Chesney admitted he had a hard time when COVID-19 forced him to reschedule his massive Chillaxification Tour, but he didn’t just sit around idle while at home. The Tennessee native reveals he has used his time as productively as he could, including starting his own garden!
“Last summer I grew a garden, which was fun, which was great,” Chesney told Radio.com. “I’ve written a few songs here and there. I have come up with about 100 different ways to be bored out of my mind. I have traveled when I could. When the pandemic happened, I took it very seriously, and I still take it very seriously, so I haven’t traveled that much. I’ve tried to be creative, and I’ve tried to stay positive. I haven’t done much else other than that.”
Chesney’s name for the garden was inspired by one of his favorite places to be: Fenway Park.
“We grew everything. You name it. I had so much,” Chesney recalled with a laugh. “The Green Monster is left field at Fenway Park, and I had this sign made called ‘The Green Monster,’ and that’s what I named my garden. Tomatoes, all kinds of vegetables. All kinds of stuff.”
Chesney’s current single is “Happy Does,” from his latest album, Here and Now. The song is one that Chesney didn’t write, but felt like it was as authentic a message he wanted to share as if he had written it himself.
“It was just the whole narrative of the song,” Chesney said. “I think my wheelhouse is talking about things that make people obviously happy. But I feel like in our everyday life right now, we live our everyday lives, it seems like, watching other people live their lives and trapped within our devices. When I first heard ‘Happy Does,’ I literally had two different devices within a hand’s reach of me. I had my phone and my iPad and I was multi-tasking. I was doing one thing here and one thing there, and trying to communicate with someone else in the middle of all of that.
“When I heard ‘Happy Does,’ it just made me sit for a second and think about, I’m not really living my own life, because I’m trying to keep up with everything, and watch everybody live there [lives],” he continued. “That’s just kind of how our brain is conditioned these days. This song was, to me, a reminder to myself to try to live in the moment, and try to breathe in and breathe out, and remember that there’s a whole big world out there, outside of your phone. That’s what that song was for me anyway, and I thought that somebody else might need to hear it too, so that’s why we released it.”
