Born

“What does life and love and truth all mean?” Kenny Chesney poses this question on the title track of his 20th studio album, a record that finds the wildly beloved country singer-songwriter reflecting on his roots and digging into his spirituality. Rather than firm answers, Chesney offers up 15 tracks that, thematically, run the gamut from casual (the sweetly cheeky “Guilty Pleasure”) to philosophical (“This Too Shall Pass”) to otherworldly, as on the touching closing track, “Wherever You Are Tonight,” which ponders where we go when we die. As he tells Apple Music, this period of reflection also finds Chesney very much focused on the future, always dreaming about where his next musical journey might lead him. “I think that I’ve been very fortunate to see a lot of my dreams come true and to live in that,” he says. “To live in gratitude that that happened. But, of course, as much as I’ve traveled, there’s still a lot of places that I haven’t been. I hope I haven’t written my best song.” Below, Chesney shares insight into several key tracks. **“Just to Say We Did”** “Songwriting is a lot like fishing. Some days you catch a lot, some days you catch a really big one, and some days you don’t catch anything. When we got done with ‘Just to Say We Did,’ it was very authentic about my life. I felt like it was, in a way, just a call to action to get off the couch of your life and just see what happens.” **“The Way I Love You Now”** “I wrote that song with Mike Reed, who I really, truly love and respect. He’s written a lot of wonderful songs. He wrote one of my favorite Tim McGraw songs ever, a song called ‘Everywhere.’ He wrote ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ by Bonnie Raitt. You can say you can forgive someone, but once you have true life perspective, like years later, is when you forgive someone. That’s when it really matters. That’s how it happened for me, anyway. Taking ego completely out of the way, taking the life experiences completely out of the way and seeing someone as a broken human being just like we all are, and forgiving them. It’s one of my favorite songs I’ve written in a while.” **“This Too Shall Pass”** “One thing I love about our audience is that they have been with us for a while, and they have seen all sides. I love being a songwriter, and that takes you down a lot of paths. Yeah, we got a lot of songs that are about having a good time and partying and being in an island life, but there’s so much more to that. There’s so much more to me than that. The layers of what was built is so much more than just that. I think that our audience understands that.” **“Wherever You Are Tonight”** “It was fifty-fifty if I was going to put it on the record or not, even though I loved it. But sometimes it makes people uncomfortable just to talk about someone passing or what’s out there, their beliefs. Whatever it is, it can be an uncomfortable conversation. But I felt like the beauty of this song, it didn’t dive into what people believed; it just dove into the idea that when someone passes, they really don’t die—they linger. They linger in us forever. They linger in the lives of the people that loved them. That’s what this whole song is about: Whatever it is you believe, or wherever you are tonight. Because I do believe there’s something, not to get too religious, but I believe that there’s something much bigger than all of us up there that we don’t understand.”