Two of the best songs musically go furthest to project absolute, un-fussy ease, even though the characters are not necessarily at rest. The sound of this album is ease (check out that easy-listening sax solo during “Way Down Here”, a soft-pop ballad), but the songs are filled with a general sense of the opposite.
Many of Chesney’s big hits and best songs have projected a sense of ease, in performance or content: think “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service”. On “Boats” he’s obsessed with, of course, boats, but really it’s with what they represent, inartfully put like this in the chorus: “boats / vessels of freedom / harbors of healing / boats.” Along with “The Life”, there’s “Keys in the Conch Shell”, an overtly Jimmy Buffett-esque number where Chesney has his own place on an island but never has the time to actually be there. The songs with the most specific island references are really about Chesney and his wish for a change, more than the setting. The most prominent character in the song is the idealized Jose, but the dominant viewpoint is envy, rooted in personal dissatisfaction. In “The Life”, Chesney admires the easy-going life of Jose, a Mexican fisherman, who doesn’t have to worry about things like buying a big house or trying to stay atop the Billboard charts. The most sure line, one that represents the album’s reached-for theme, is sung not by Chesney but by guest Dave Matthews: “it’s good for the soul / when there’s not a soul in sight.”Įven the songs that are most about living the easy island life feel unsettled, even anxious. The music’s feeling isn’t realized contentment but uncertainty. It sounds like he’s trying to convince himself. The sentiment that opens the LP, on a song that Willie Nelson also finely sang on the 2008 Buddy Cannon/Kenny Chesney-produced Moment of Forever album, is ‘at least I’m alive, that’s all that matters’. The most specific lyrics, like one on “Boats” where a man says goodbye to his wife with the line “it’s been real but it ain’t been fun”, startle a bit, since mostly he goes for a general sense of being down in the dumps, a general mood of brooding. The problems Chesney, or his protagonist, is running away from are barely spelled out, though he’s publicly talked about this album being about his brief marriage to actress Renee Zellweger. Or as Chesney puts it on the second song, “Way Down Here”, “if I’m gonna be down / gonna be down / way down here.” It’s a place to take your earthly troubles and, hopefully, let them wash away with the tide. Here the beach is not about non-stop fun in the sun.
This is a ‘beach album’, but a particularly dour one. The back cover shows Chesney’s fishing boat in the water, and on the beach his chair - the old blue chair of his similarly themed 2005 album Be As You Are (Songs From an Old Blue Chair).
The inside, would-be gatefold cover shows a photo of him sitting on the beach playing the guitar, with palm trees and an improbably perfect sunset behind him. Kenny Chesney is vacationing on a tropical island for his new album Lucky Old Sun.
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