Megan’s Present To Kenny Chesney
Megan Moroney spent all last year on the road with Kenny Chesney. At the end of the year, she wanted to give him a Christmas present. She told Country Countdown USA’s Lon Helton it was quite a challenge.
(Lon) Well, let’s talk about Mr. Chesney for a little bit. You’re out with him on the road last year. I want to talk about this song a little bit. It’s called… (Megan) You had to be there. (Lon) And I’m curious. So you guys, you became friends with Kenny because you were out on the road together last year. I’m curious how do you first approach him and say, I have this song. Did you write the song first and then say, Kenny, I’d like to… What happened?
(Megan) Okay. So I’ll give you the full story. I was on a writer’s trip in December, literally December 20th, because we never stopped working around here. I was down at the beach in Panama City with Mackenzie Carpenter, Micah Carpenter, and Ben Williams, who we wrote I’m Not Pretty together, also this one, and a bunch of others. But I knew I wanted to write about the tour, because I always write about things that are really important to me or really emotionally impacted me. And the tour was one of those things. And when I was trying to think of titles for it, it was one of those things where I’m like, you just had to be there to understand what it meant to me. And just how… It was so much fun. I have never had more fun in my life. It was the best summer of my life. I would do that every single year if I could. And so that’s where the title came from. (1:34) We’re down at the beach. We know that we want to write a song about the Kenny Chesney tour. So Micah starts playing this guitar lick that kind of maybe could sound like something Kenny Chesney would sing. We wrote the song in like 45 minutes. It was easy, because we literally just tell the story of what happened. In 2018, I bought tickets to see Kenny Chesney at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium. He was on his Trip Around the Sun tour. Me and my college friends are going to the tour, and that’s how the first verse starts. Five girls in the mirror put makeup on. First chorus is like, we’re at the show. I see the lights. I hear the band. Second verse comes around, and it’s like seven years later, got a different point of view. Got a sound check in 10 in my own dressing room. So it’s literally just like the story of what happened and how everything unfolded. I would say from stage every night, I would look up at the 300 section and be like, hey guys, I was you up there. So if you’re dreaming, don’t stop, because I would have never, ever thought that I’d be on stage seven years later. So writing the song itself was pretty simple, because once we figured out we could have a chorus that felt like you’re having a good time at a concert, we made the first verse about college, second verse about me being on tour with him. And when we wrote it, it’s December 20th, so I was like, I’ve got to get Kenny a Christmas present. I’ve been stressed out about that for a couple of weeks before, because I don’t know what to get Kenny Chesney for Christmas. Kenny Chesney has everything. He goes where he wants to when he wants to, so you don’t really want to buy him an experience, because then he has a time frame of when he has to do it. He could literally do whatever he wants. So I was like, I’m going to have to get creative here. Then when I ended up writing this song, and we loved it, I wrote out the lyrics for him, and I had the demo. So right from New Year’s, the Dick Clark thing, we flew straight to the island, me and my whole team. We kind of had a New Year’s thing down in the island. And I played him the song, and I told him that it was his Christmas gift. So yeah, it was very nerve wracking.
(Lon) I just heard a rough mix, and you’re going to have to help me on the line. I think the line was, I saw the world with a king of no shoes. (Megan) Going round the world with a king of no shoes. So his face, when he heard that line. Freaked out. I mean, his hand was in his face. He had to turn around. He was looking out at the view to just try to take it in, he said, but it was nerve-wracking to play, you know, country superstar Kenny Chesney, a song that you wrote. Like I don’t even know if I would, I mean, we’re good friends, so I’m sure I could play him anything, but it was definitely nerve wracking. I prefaced it by saying, I want you to know that this is a gift, and I wrote this about the tour and how much the tour meant to me. If you hate the song, like I’m not asking you to do a duet with me. Like this is just like, I didn’t know what else to get you. That’s how you set it up? Yeah. Well, I didn’t, I know how uncomfortable it is when someone’s like, do this song with me. And I’m like, what a great setup. So he ended up loving it and now it exists. And I’m, it’s a dream come true.
It’s going to be like the song of the summer. I hope so. We played it on the boat down on the island and it does sound good on a boat, so it passed the test. Yeah. So that was the gift. Yep. The song. And he, he has this guest book down on the island and he taped it in there. And we all wrote like New Year’s Day 2025 and we all like wrote something around it. So the lyric, like the actual lyrics that I wrote out are in his guest book at the island. It’s very cool.
Megan joined Kenny at his Las Vegas residency to perform their duet together.
Category: CO-HOST
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