Concert review: Kenny Chesney uses fun but familiar playbook — then springs a surprise
At 9:55 p.m. Saturday, the temperature dipped below 70, a light breeze rustled the flags high above the north and south edges of Bank of America Stadium, and — although it was by no means chilly — I imagined those who had dressed for a pleasant spring evening as opposed to a hot summer night probably weren’t sorry.
Meanwhile, up on stage, Kenny Chesney looked like he’d been roasting for an hour in an oven set to 425 degrees.
Sweat had been dampening the 54-year-old country star’s blue Love For Love City tank top since he sang the first “Let the warm air melt these blues away” in set-opener “Beer in Mexico”; by the time he warbled his famous “Everything gets hotter when the sun goes down” line, 13 songs later, his shirt was drenched with enough perspiration to fill an empty bottle of his Blue Chair Bay Rum.
In other words, for No Shoes Nation fans who’ve been watching him soak his shirts at shows for decades, no matter the weather, it was just like old times.
And it wasn’t just the sweat. Saturday night’s concert had all the hallmarks of a typical Kenny Chesney show — from the various video montages of beautiful people practicing hedonism in tropical paradises to the impromptu alcohol-fueled on-stage birthday celebrations to the moment when he gives a deserving-looking fan a gift they’ll cherish for the rest of their life.
Oh, not to mention the two-hour-plus parade of hits he performs while ceaselessly hopping, skipping and jumping around the stage (hence the sweatiness).
But this particular show was more remarkable than usual, in more ways than one.
In part, that’s simply because it’d been awhile. After a run of six Charlotte concerts in the 2010s that got fans used to being able to catch him here practically every year, this was his first visit since 2018. It was also, as he pointed out multiple times, his first time performing at the home of the Carolina Panthers in a decade.
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“Ten years,” he said, sounding incredulous, first during a pre-taped segment at the top of the show that saw him wearing a Panthers helmet while standing in the upper deck of the stadium, and once again during a break in “Til’ It’s Gone,” his third song of the night.
Might I remind you that, prior to The Rolling Stones’ concert there last September, no one had performed at Bank of America Stadium in close to 10 years.
That’s what made Saturday night’s show so remarkable for the NFL’s Panthers, the team’s parent company Tepper Sports & Entertainment, and its owner, David Tepper: Two and a half-plus years after a promise they made to dive headfirst back into the live-music business was broken by the pandemic, they have just successfully pulled off two gigantic concerts in a span of only eight days. (Billy Joel played the stadium a Saturday night ago.)
Perhaps even more incredibly, it should be said that the Panthers’ organization took on the mountain of work involved with setting up for the show, and staging the show, and tearing down the show while participating in the marathon pressure cooker known as the NFL Draft.
To top it all off, while Chesney was playing hits like “Summertime” and “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problem,” local staff was also busy with monitoring Tepper’s other pro team — Major League Soccer expansion club Charlotte FC, which was playing a game in Orlando, Fla.,
It was an effort worthy of a tribute that marked the night’s most Instagram-able moment.
After briefly disappearing off-stage late in the show following a rousing performance of upbeat ’90s hit “How Forever Feels,” Chesney returned to say, “I gotta tell ya, almost forgot. ... I wasn’t gonna do this song. That’s why we almost walked off stage. But ... the Carolina Panthers organization as a whole have treated us so incredibly. It’s been unbelievable. And I wanna thank those guys for having us over here tonight.”
“I wasn’t gonna do this,” he repeated, “but because of them, we’re gonna do it.”
Then he teed up his sentimental ode to high school football, “The Boys of Fall,” which in and of itself was a setup for the moment when he summoned a group of Panthers onto the stage. It came as little shock that Christian McCaffrey was one of them, as Dan Smyers from Dan + Shay had teased during the duo’s opening set that the star running back was in attendance; but I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised to see both Tepper and Coach Matt Rhule with a little bit of wide-eyed wonder on their faces as they regarded the roar of a different type of home crowd.
With the band continuing to rock its way through an instrumental version of “The Boys of Fall,” Chesney produced a Panthers helmet that everyone took turns signing, and posed for a photo with the group.
Then he and McCaffrey went out onto the catwalk with the helmet, and only had to scan the pit for a few seconds before settling on a young boy who they invited onto the stage. The rowdiest ovation of the entire concert came when the two stars slid the helmet onto the boy’s head, the roughly 50,000 fans in attendance both thrilled for and jealous of the kid at the same time.
A close second, in terms of decibel level? That’d be around the halfway point, because, well, everyone who loves Kenny loves a party.
After Chesney stopped in the middle of “When the Sun Goes Down” to note bassist Harmoni Kelley’s birthday, fans went wild as she heeded his order to guzzle a margarita out of an obnoxiously large glass — like, crockpot-sized — while he led the singing of “Happy Birthday”; they went even wilder because Chesney brought out a shot board, modeled after a water ski, to which was Velcro’d four mini-glasses of tequila that he, Kelley and two other band members knocked back as a group.
Chesney sandwiched that between a performance of “Save It for a Rainy Day” with opener Old Dominion’s Matthew Ramsey and Brad Tursi (who co-wrote the 2015 hit for Chesney) and a duet of “You and Tequila” with yet another opener, Carly Pearce (an idea Chesney said was inspired by his mother, who he said was in the audience and had told her son before the show that she wanted to meet her).
Seven songs later, Chesney shared the spotlight with Harmoni Kelley again when she ably took on the part Pink made famous in their 2016 duet “Setting the World on Fire.”
But the star of the show was most in his element — and the musical portion of the show was the most exuberant — when he was alone on the catwalk, singing and sashaying and jabbing at the air and beating his chest and blowing kisses.
Graciously collecting souvenirs from fans in the form of license plates, flags and trucker hats.
Effortlessly dodging hiccups both major, like the egregious audio issues that plagued parts of Dan + Shay’s set, and minor, like the female fan who bandit-ed her way onto the stage as he sang “Noise” before being foiled by security.
Forcing the cynics among us to wonder whether he’s just pretending to play the guitar (sorry, I couldn’t help it, guys), but at the same time leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that he’s having fun up there.
He’s been doing it for his entire touring life, smiling so widely and so often during live shows that you can’t imagine how his face doesn’t ache for days afterward.
And like he’s done at each of the four other concerts of his that I’ve been to here, he capped Saturday night’s show with a session of high-fives and autographs and goodbyes that lasted so long that, by the time he was finished, probably more than two-thirds of the crowd was already on their way home.
So I’ll end by saying this: With all the talk of “the new normal” these days, it felt really special — and was a whole lot of fun — to see Chesney work up such a sweat while bringing the old normal back to Charlotte again.
Kenny Chesney’s setlist
1. “Beer in Mexico”
2. “Reality”
3. “Til It’s Gone”
4. “Here and Now”
5. “Summertime”
6. “We Do”
7. “Pirate Flag”
8. “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems”
9. “Somewhere With You”
10. “I Go Back”
11. “Get Along”
12. “Anything but Mine”
13. “Save It for a Rainy Day” (with Old Dominion)
14. “When the Sun Goes Down”
15. “You and Tequila” (with Carly Pearce)
16. “All the Pretty Girls”
17. “Living in Fast Forward”
18. “Young”
19. “Noise”
20. “American Kids”
21. “Setting the World on Fire”
22. “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright”
23. “How Forever Feels”
24. “The Boys of Fall”
Encore:
25. “Don’t Happen Twice”
26. “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”
This story was originally published May 1, 2022 at 12:45 PM.
