Kenny Chesney talks about the songs on his album Cosmic Hallelujah.

  “Trip Around The Sun”
“I think this album Cosmic Hallelujah takes people on a journey a lot like our show does, and I’m proud of that. I love that. I think it’s a very emotional record. I think it’s a fun record. I think that, there’s a song on this record that I think defines our life out here and the connection with our fans, and it’s the song where Cosmic Hallelujah came from, and that song is called ‘Trip Around the Sun.’ And I’ve said that before to my road family out here because every year that we, the very first show of every year I will get everybody in some area of the stadium or where ever we are playing, and I will make a speech to say how fortunate we all should be, and that we get to do this again. That we get to take another trip around the sun together. And when I heard this song I thought oh my god there’s my speech you know, and it’s about, that song is so much about living in the moment and just enjoying your life.

  “All The Pretty Girls”
“‘All The Pretty Girls’ has so much life wrapped into three and a half minutes. I think if you ask anyone that’s a musician, or that writes songs for a living, or plays guitar in any way, the majority of my friends that play guitar or in this business did it so a girl would pay attention to them…and that’s my case. I wrote my first song about a girl that was in my persuasion class, ironically enough. I was trying to persuade her into going out with me. Now she sat right beside me and I gave her the tape of the song I wrote about her and the next day I went in, I was scared right, and she was sitting all the way in the corner on the other side of the room, which that was my first taste of rejection in life OK, when it came to my music. But, when I first heard this song I knew it was me. I knew that the beauty of it was that so many different age groups can feel that angst in the song, and hear those lines in the song and go, ‘oh my god that’s me and my buddies.’ Cause we all got in trouble, we all had our parents tell us what to do. We had the Sheriff tell us what to do. We had the preacher tell us what to do. We had everybody telling us what to do, but all we ever heard is what the pretty girls said.”

  “Setting The World On Fire”
“After I recorded ‘Setting The World On Fire,’ and after I lived with it for a little while, I realize I needed a woman’s voice to be in the song with me, and Pink’s voice holds so many feelings. When I hear her sing, I hear joy, I hear want, a bit of toughness, and a little bit of hurt. To me that’s the mark of a great singer, and a great vocalist…someone that can make you feel all those things at once, and I’ve always really respected her and loved her singing, and I guess it’s because when I hear Pink sing, I truly believe what she’s saying to me.”

  “Noise”
“I started writing ‘Noise’ without really even knowing I was doing it. You know, the world today is just loud…there’s so much that drowns out our living, our thinking, and just being. We have all these news channels, we have everyone on their cell phones, everyone in their cell phones. There’s just a lot of frequencies running through our heads because of all that. I started listing out a lot of things that kept me from having a certain sense of peace at the end of the day. And I was on my way to market meeting, and I was on the phone with Shane McAnally, and I was talking to him about that idea of just all these different frequencies that run through our lives every day, that are just loud…and they’re so loud, and so constant that it’s hard to make sense of anything, it all just becomes white noise, and that’s where the idea of ‘Noise’ came from.”

  “Bucket”
“I love ‘Bucket.’ Just because in my own life I have so many things that I want to let roll off my back, that I want to just push away and go do what I want to do. You know, but we all have this list of stuff in our life that we’ve got to get done no matter who you are, no matter what you do for a living. We all have these things that we just want to say I’m not going to do that today. I want to go over here and do what I want to. You know, and I’m not going to care about that today. I’ll care about it some other time. I want to go over here and care about this, and for me I got a long, like everyone else, I’ve got a long list of stuff that I just want to say not today to you know. And I think that my favorite line of Bucket, if you’re a little depressed or a little bit lost, write it all down and blow it all off. Which is what they teach you in therapy, you know, but we’re all a letter away from perpetual bliss, cause sometimes it is that simple of putting an F over the B of your bucket list is just such a brilliantly written song because sometimes it is just that simple of making the decision in your own life, in your head, in your heart, of going ‘you know what I know I’ve got all this stuff to do but I want to go do this, and I know that’s there’s expectations of me doing this over here but I want to throw all of that away for a while and I’m going to go take care of myself. I’m gonna go have fun. I’m going to go do whatever it is I want to do’ and that may be selfish or whatever but sometimes you need to be selfish for yourself, and that is the whole definition, that is the whole core of Bucket, is putting an F on the B of your bucket list.”

  “Bar At The End Of The World”
“There’s a song on the record called ‘Bar at the End of the World,’ and the thing about it, and if anybody that knows me, knows I’m in constant search of them, and I have found several. I think the thing that makes them unique, that makes every one of them unique is the people. The people, the history, the DNA of each bar makes them all different. Bars are unique places because they allow you to live your life, they allow you to connect with people and to let go of people. Being able to write your name on a dollar bill like the song says and date it, and staple it to the side of the wall or to the side of the bar or on the ceiling where there are flags and license plates and life and saltwater everywhere and salty air and it’s just this layer of life throughout the place. To be able to stamp your life in a small way in a place like that and to leave and come back. It’s always interesting to watch human behavior because you want to know that that dollar bill is still there, and if it is, that makes you feel great and it makes you feel even better about the place and there’s a lot of those places. In my own life there is. For all my friends in Florida, there’s so many bars in the Keys like that, that’s their escape. It allows them to escape. The idea of going to a bar at the end of the world, whether it’s at the end of the world or whether it’s a bar just outside of town. It’s just the idea is the same, it’s the escape of your life and I think that’s an emotion that everybody holds in their heart and within themselves is this place in their head where they can escape.”

  “Some Town Somewhere”
“‘Some Town Somewhere’ defines me as a kid, because I did wonder what was past my county line and I did wonder what was out there.  I just didn’t become a dreamer when I was 25 or 21. I was a dreamer as a kid. I wanted to be part of the big red machine, the Cincinnati Reds. I wanted to be an athlete. So I was dreaming even then, but the line in ‘Some Town Somewhere’ that said ‘Mexico was miles from here,’ look I never thought I would see Mexico, much less write a song called ‘Beer in Mexico’ one day, you know about you being lost down there trying to get rid of a relationship. I didn’t even think I would see it. The idea of me going to Mexico was just, for a kid in east Tennessee, it’s the same distance as the moon. So when I heard the line ‘Mexico is miles from here but the Texaco has a lot of beer,’ that was me. That was all my buddies that was trying to go down to the local package store in Union County Tennessee trying to get them to sell beer to under age kids. They didn’t do it but we still tried cause we knew we were never going to Mexico. So that’s why ‘Some Town Somewhere’ resonated so much with me.”

  “Rich And Miserable”
“There’s a song ‘Rich and Miserable’ on the record that is very unique for me. I mean not just on a production end, but I think it was a fine line to walk for me singing a song saying we won’t be happy till we’re rich and miserable. I think it can be taken the wrong way if you don’t really listen. I think that we can get so lost in this climbing the ladder, and look, I’m a dreamer and I am very very focused and I am very very driven, and I’ve done nothing since I was in college but climb the ladder, nothing. And I believe in the American dream too, OK, but I think if there’s a message to this song, if there’s a social message to this song ‘Rich and Miserable’ is try to live in the moment as much as you possibly can because if you get caught in constantly dreaming and climbing the ladder, and if you let those dreams be your master there’s this chance that you might get that, you may achieve that, but you might not have too many people around you to celebrate it with.’

  “Jesus And Elvis”
“I think if there’s a song on the record that helps ground the record, its ‘Jesus and Elvis’. It’s a classic country song, I mean it has a steal guitar solo for god’s sake. You don’t hear many steel guitar solos on the radio today or on anybody’s record. Some but not many. I think that as a kid when I was first starting this idea or journey, or first dreaming about it, I had my heroes, and when I heard ‘Jesus and Elvis’ it reminded me of those songs that turned me on in the first place to country music and to want to move to town and to try to be creative. This is such a brilliant song. It reminds me of a song that Dean Dillon wrote and they are not similar in anyway but it reminds me of a song called ‘The Chair’ that George Strait cut or it reminds me of ‘Tennessee Whiskey’ that George Jones did or it reminds me of these classic country songs that just draw you in.”

  “Coach”
“I only wrote two songs on this record. I wrote ‘Noise’ and a song called ‘Coach,’ and ‘Coach’ to me really is at its core how I grew up, and the people that mattered a lot to me. Cause as a kid, when you’re a kid you’re very impressionable and I don’t think it’s any secret that people that have followed me for a while know that music and sports are very important to me, and so the figures that I had as a kid were the people that I looked up to, obviously you know members of your family, but were my coaches…because they’re the people that you spend a lot of time with and your very impressionable as a young person and sometimes a coach can make or break you as an individual, and can set you on a path to be better than you thought you ever could be, and I love that. It’s not necessarily, I wrote it in mind as a football coach but the way we wrote it, its non-sports specific. I mean it could be anybody that had a relationship with their coach that had a positive effect on their life, and that’s a lot of people.”