HEART LIFE MUSIC

The country star delivers an amiable rags-to-riches memoir.

Chesney, writing with country music journalist Gleason, opens with his boyhood in a small town along the Clinch River at enough distance from Knoxville, Tennessee, for the night skies to be dark—an idyllic theme that Chesney explores at points throughout his memoir. There he heard “follow-the-bouncing-ball” church hymns, but also fell under the spell (and who doesn’t?) of George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Conway Twitty. It was seeing the last, “standing there in blue pants and a hot pink shirt,” that settled a young Chesney on a musical career, though he listens on every page with receptive ears to whatever music is playing: Tom Petty, reggae, Jimmy Buffett, bluegrass, Van Halen, Joe Walsh, the list goes on. A young Chesney arrives in Nashville, playing the tip-jar bar circuit and learning through painful trial and error just what goes into making a song: “The job is to take a slice of life, write all about it, slice it down to what matters, then cut that feeling wide open.” In time, he also learns the business behind the business, from cultivating personal persistence to having enough merch on hand to fuel the bus. From there to headlining is a big step, but there the merch comes in, too; says one promoter, “T-shirts! That’s how we measure passion.” Chesney is passionate about the music, to be sure, and refreshingly open to experimentation, as when he paired up with folk-rocker Grace Potter. He is modest and circumspect about other aspects of his life, keeping mum about his most tabloid-famous relationship. There’s good humor here, too, as when he writes about the black cowboy hat that he calls Darth Vader “because it transforms the guy from East Tennessee into a country star.”

A plainspoken, pleasing success story from a hardworking artist.