When Kenny Chesney’s Heart Life Music debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction and Combined Print and E-Book Nonfiction lists, the East Tennessee songwriter/superstar who became the 2025 Country Music Hall of Fame Contemporary inductee and first country artist to take his music into another dimension at Las Vegas’ Sphere knew there was only one way to celebrate: a book event in New York City. After closing the opening weekend of the prestigious Miami Book Fair with a sold-out conversation with co-author and friend Holly Gleason, the pair will do one more book event in partnership with the Strand at Kaufman Music Center on the Upper West Side.
“It’s amazing how much people love listening to us talk about the process, the stories, why I finally did it,” marvels the man called “the People’s Superstar” by the Los Angeles Times. “After three completely sold-out events in Florida, it felt like we weren’t truly done. After all, you don’t get a New York Times Number One every day, and it seemed like we needed to do one of these talks in New York.”
With a 7 p.m. start time – and doors opening at 5:30 – Chesney’s next book talk is perhaps the most intimate. Less than 450 tickets are available, but with such quick notice, it seemed like the right place and time to do one more conversation about Heart Life Music, which has not only topped both the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction and Combined Print and E-Book Nonfiction lists, but has struck a chord with taste-making critics.
“Kenny Chesney Pulls Back the Curtain with Heart Life Music,” Garden & Gun titled a multiple page story, while Tennessean offered, “this book digs deeper than surface-level conversations…. (it) offers answers and honesty regarding career-long inspirations and passion” and Publishers Weekly raved “One for the Road.” In addition, People wrote the book “gives fans an inside and in-depth look at his life and career, and ultimately drives home one overarching theme: Chesney's truest love is creating music,” Wall Street Journal opined, “an emphatic success” and Travel + Leisure wrote “Heart Life Music emerges as perhaps more than a memoir. For Chesney, it’s a genuine meditation on connection and purpose.”
At a time when so much in the world is polarizing, Chesney’s postcards from a life that saw a college kid go to Moscow, spend time playing a dissolute Lower Broadway only to be signed by a label originally from Macon, Georgia through touring and learning from icons Alabama and George Jones, a whirlwind of friendships with heroes including Jimmy Buffett, Eddie Van Halen, Bruce Springsteen, Sammy Hagar, the Wailers, as well as collaborating with Dave Matthews, Uncle Kracker, Willie Nelson and Grace Potter, put people in the moment and offer a map to create unthinkable things through consistent, if small steps. Offering plenty of wisdom shared, frustrations and failures along the way, Heart Life Music exults the triumphs and the fun that emerged over time.
Known for commanding the largest stages nationwide, Kenny Chesney’s first book takes the reader – or audio book listener – to places long gone, creates unexpected music in Jamaica, the Kremlin, New England and Cabo San Lucas, drifts across the waters of the Caribbean, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Beyond meeting and collaborating with heroes, forging transcendent friendships in the islands and beyond, Chesney’s introspective look at the songs and sound that defined No Shoes Nation offers the intimacy of sharing a slow afternoon on the water.
Tickets for the December 2 event at Kaufman Music Center are available HERE. Seating is limited; each ticket holder will receive an autographed copy of Heart Life Music as well.
About The Authors
One of contemporary American music’s biggest names, Kenny Chesney was voted into the Country Music Hall of Fame this year and was named Billboard’s No.1 Country Artist of the 21st Century. Selling out America’s major stadiums for two decades and playing to over a million fans every summer since 2002, Variety pronounced him “country music’s only true long-term stadium act.” The East Tennessee songwriter/superstar has over 105 Platinum certifications, won the prestigious Entertainer of the Year eight times, as well as holding Billboard’s record for the most Country Airplay No. 1s with 36 chart-topping songs that define coming of age in the flyover in the 21st Century. This year, the game-changing superstar became the first country artist to perform at the groundbreaking Sphere, taking No Shoes Nation into a whole new dimension, creating a space to work hard, play hard, love hard and come together in the spirit of celebrating all the moment offers. Heart Life Music is his first book.
Holly Gleason’s work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, the Library of Congress’ National Registry of Sound Recordings, among other outlets. She was the LA Press Club’s Entertainment Journalist of the Year and the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Association’s Independent Journalist of the Year. A former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame/Case Western Reserve Fellow, she’s the creator of Belmont Book Award-winning Woman Walk The Line, and co-authored Miranda Lambert’s New York Times best-seller Y’All Eat Yet as well as Prine on Prine: Interviews & Encounters.