NASHVILLE, Tenn. – It’s becoming apparent that Silver Sands Marina, Kenny Chesney’s 21st studio album and first for independent HEY NOW, sees the Country Music Hall of Famer hitting not just a new gear creatively, but connecting with fans on an even realer level. With “Carry On” becoming his 100th charting single and giving him the most Top 10s in the genre, the life-affirming midtempo summer anthem also struck a chord with radio as it became only the third song in history to close out all the reporting stations its first week.
 
As “Silver Sands Marina” established the power of one perfect encounter being enough, not clinging but appreciating what things are for the moment, the title track set a tone that suggests a map for how to live life as it comes, for all its worth, and with all the positive energy that’s defined his career. And on July 31, the East Tennessee songwriter-superstar will offer another taste of what’s to come on a project he’s personally labeling “an album.”
 
“Burn My Boat” starts as a ballad-leaning-midtempo strung across an acoustic guitar figure and his unadorned vocal, but quickly builds to a stunning crescendo that is thundering drums, a muscular melodic swoop and a triumphant sense of arrival. With an opening line of “This is one of those uncharted water things, never been where the grass don’t get more green… Think I love where I am,” the first track on Silver Sands Marina suggests that finding where we belong is a kind of freedom that is as much acceptance as it is actual location.
 
“This was always the first song,” Chesney says. “No matter how many sequences, adding those three songs, ‘Burn My Boat’ was the exact thing I wanted to say, and it’s in the chorus, recognizing ‘where I’m supposed to be’ is that sense of true arrival, knowing where you’re supposed to be. When you’re restless, and I am, there is no greater peace or freedom.
 
“Even more, ‘Burn My Boat’ wasn’t a song of surrender, but arrival. It builds and builds, like Lord Huron’s ‘Ends of the Earth,’ but what it delivers is what I think most of us are hoping to find. That line: Take this heart and light it/Send it up in smoke? It really is burning off all the things that distract us from what matters in this faster, harder, more world we deal with.”
 
Written by Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer Casey Beathard, Tucker Beathard and Ryan Tyndall, “Burn My Boat” can be a love song, a life song, a work or chasing one’s dream song. “Whatever’s one’s truest passion is, when you find it, everything else falls into place and makes sense,” offers the man who just wrapped his second Sphere residency and named his No. 1 New York Times best-seller Heart Life Music.
 
For Chesney, who came of age as a songwriter at Acuff Rose Music Publishing, he brings a deep commitment to the music he releases. Silver Sands Marina raises the bar – in terms of what it says, the progressive and classic songs – for an artist with impossibly high standards. He will discuss the process, the decisions and what he hopes people will take way from the album when he returns to TalkShopLive July 30 at 7 p.m. ET. To tune in or to purchase the TalkShopLive exclusive signed picture disc vinyl, click HERE.
 
With a Sept. 25th release date, Silver Sands Marina draws ever closer. Pre-Save or Pre-Order HERE.
 
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