Kenny Chesney

It sold 100,000 copies and caught the attention of several big-time major labels. Chesney ended up signing with RCA subsidiary BNA, which released All I Need to Know in 1995. The album gave him his first two Top Ten hits in the title track and ‘Fall in Love.’ His follow-up, 1996’s Me and You, became his first album to go gold, thanks to two number two singles in the title track and ‘When I Close My Eyes.’ Released in 1997, I Will Stand was another gold-selling effort that gave Chesney his first-ever number one hit in ‘She’s Got It All,’ plus another number two with ‘That’s Why I’m Here.’ His big-time breakthrough, however, came with 1999’s Everywhere We Go, which sold over two million copies and spawned two number one hits with ‘You Had Me from Hello’ and ‘How Forever Feels’; it also featured another Top Ten single in ‘What I Need to Do,’ and another, ‘She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,’ that just missed. In 2000, Chesney issued his first Greatest Hits compilation, and two newly recorded songs — ‘I Lost It’ and ‘Don’t Happen Twice’ — went to number three and number one, respectively.

Greatest Hits became Chesney’s second straight double-platinum release and topped the country LP charts. He followed it with the all-new No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem in early 2002, which gave him his strongest commercial performance yet. It, too, hit number one on the country album charts and spun off four Top Ten singles in ‘Young,’ the number one ‘The Good Stuff,’ the Bill Anderson co-write ‘A Lot of Things Different,’ and ‘Big Star.’ A Christmas album plugged the gap for 2003, and he returned strongly with 2004’s When the Sun Goes Down, which won in the Album of the Year category at the Country Music Awards. He repeated the win, this time as Entertainer of the Year, with Be as You Are (Songs from an Old Blue Chair). In the years that followed, Chesney kept busy, releasing Live: Live Those Songs Again in 2006 and Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates in 2007. In April 2010, Chesney and director Joe Thomas released the 3D concert film Kenny Chesney: Summer in 3D. Taken from his 2009 Sun City Carnival Tour, the film included 23 songs from six stadium shows, shot in 3D, interspersed with interviews and home movies. A completely new studio album, Hemingway’s Whiskey, named after a Guy Clark song, also appeared in 2010.