“I Am Very Jaded”: Kenny Chesney Opens Up About Choosing Songs for ‘Silver Sands Marina’

Kenny Chesney is shedding light on how he chose tracks for his new album, Silver Sands Marina, with the ‘Get Along’ hitmaker admitting he has grown “very jaded” as he searches for songs and stories that show him something he hasn't heard before.

Chesney has established a reputation for not only writing some of the most evocative and immersive songs in modern country music, from ‘I Go Back’ to ‘Beer in Mexico’, but also having a knack for knowing which songs to record and which to leave.

On his new album, Silver Sands Marina, Chesney didn't write any of the songs. But as he explains to Cody Alan in a new SiriusXM interview, he sees this as a strength, not a weakness.

Chesney touches on the challenges of having such a wealth of material behind him already, “I don't know if the bar is higher, but I mean, you can't repeat yourself. That's the thing...I didn't write any songs on Silver Sands Marina...It's the first album in a long time that I haven't written any songs on. But I've never been the kind of artist that has to write their own songs. If I write some, great. If I don't, great”.

He goes on, “To be creative enough to write a bunch of songs better than everybody else in town hasn't been my reality in the last couple years. I have done two summers at the Sphere. I wrote a book. I put it out. And I was in the process of making this record. So, I mean, I did write a lot of songs, but none of them made this record”.

He confesses that he's grown “jaded” over time when listening to new song pitches, laughing, “I'm very hard to impress and I'm jaded. I mean, I am very jaded and...not on purpose. I'm just like, okay, I've heard that, you know...But I'm hard to impress...Somebody sends me a song that you're [like], ‘Okay, yeah, I've done that’”.

The ‘Burn My Boat’ crooner candidly concludes, “It's a thin target now. Like, you know, when I first started, you could sing about anything, right?...That's not the way it is now”.

Although Chesney jokes about being jaded in his approach to cutting new songs, in practice, it makes the No Shoes Nation figurehead a far more astute and selective artist.

Chesney clearly feels no pressure to follow a trend or pursue someone else's idea of what constitutes a ‘good’ song, instead searching for something that resonates with him.

And the end result is a captivating album in the form of Silver Sands Marina. Although not necessarily featuring the obvious Country Radio chart-toppers that past projects have had, it is full of eye-catching and left-field offerings, from the wonderfully innocent ‘Goldfish‘ to the subtly subversive ‘Shot a Car Into Space’.

His talent for knowing which songs to cut is one of the reasons Chesney has been able to remain in the upper echelon of country music for the best part of three decades.

Each release offers his loyal fanbase the sun-soaked, tropically-minded spirit they first fell in love with on No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems back in 2002, while still finding ways in which he can explore uncharted territory and give listeners something new.