Kenny Chesney Lands The Cover Of Newsweek For HEART LIFE MUSIC Launch
(EBM) Having spent over a year working on HEART LIFE MUSIC, Kenny Chesney celebrates its release by visiting with two separate "TODAY" hosts; Craig Melvin and Jenna Bush Hager. With the media starting to weigh in - Publisher's Weekly called it "one for the road" and Travel + Leisure declared it "a genuine meditation on connection and purpose" - the East Tennessee songwriter/superstar finds himself on the cover of Newsweek.
With a headline that reads "Keeping It Real: Kenny Chesney Stays True To His Roots," the 2025 Country Music Hall of Fame inductee sat for an extended interview with editor-in-chief Jennifer H. Cunningham that also provided source material for a cover profile. Considering the values he was raised with, his journey and the way he blazed a trail as an artist, his multi-media "Newsmakers" series appearance arrives as the crowning print story of his book launch.
"Me? On the cover of Newsweek magazine?" Chesney says. "When you're thinking about things that might happen when you grow up, that's absolutely not one of them. Newsweek covers diplomats, business leaders, scientists and doctors, people who save lives. I live to make people happy, to create space with my songs for people to see their own lives; it's not quite the same."
There are plenty of people who might not view Chesney's impact so humbly. Profiled in The Wall Street Journal's "My Monday Morning" series, they wrote, "His transformation-which he revisits in his new book, 'Heart Life Music' -was an emphatic success." That ability to thread hard work, joy and bringing people together has been a throughline of street day for HEART LIFE MUSIC. Whether a playlist that traces his career and his influences for Billboard, a deeply personal conversation with Anderson Cooper or sitting down with the panels on "CBS Morning" and "The View," this was the man the Los Angeles Times called "the People's Superstar" at his most open and in the moment.
"It's weird," he explains, "moving forward the way I have for so many years, I haven't thought about a lot of these things, definitely not in the way they come together in the book. So, talking to these really great journalists, like Anderson or Gayle King or the people at Newsweek, it really shifts how I see my life and my journey. All these little moments that were wonderful, they all added up to something really incredible in how I got here."
As Chesney's book tour hit Philadelphia's Academy of Music, news arrived that HEART LIFE MUSIC had been named to Barnes & Noble's Best Memoir/Biography List for 2025. It joins books by Kamala Harris, Ozzy Osbourne, Malala Yousafzai, Matthew McConnaughey, Paul McCartney, Margaret Atwood, Cameron Crowe, Michelle Obama, Anthony Bourdain and more.
"The journey around the journey has been pretty great, too," Chesney confesses. "With the audiobook taking so long to record, because I wanted to get it right - and I didn't want someone else to tell my story - you get lost in the idea that someone else is going to actually hear it.
"Going out for these book talks, it's nothing like I imagined: people are so alive and interested. It's not just the story; it's living the story with people that makes it fun. So much so, we're actually creating a virtual event out of our Los Angeles book talk, so people who aren't in the markets we're coming to can be part of this experience."
Tickets to that event, scheduled for this Friday, Nov. 7, are available here.
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