Kenny Chesney wasn’t even sure he had a story to tell when he embarked on Heart Life Music, but he knew he wanted to honor the places that shaped him, the characters who showed him and a creative community that is being lost to the crush of writing songs and making records that’s less about the individual and more about the algorithm. Working with longtime collaborator Holly Gleason, the pair realized a book that distilled the essence of what made the Nashville of George Jones, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson ripe for a kid from East Tennessee with drive, dreams and no clear plan.
Today, Chesney and Gleason were announced as finalists for the 2027 ANDY Awards, the only national awards program dedicated to book collaborations. Given by the American Society of Journalists and Authors in collaboration with the Gotham Ghostwriters, Heart Life Music is short-listed in the Memoir category alongside Joshua A. Miele’s Connecting Dots: A Blind Life with Wendell Jamieson and George E. Johnson’s Afrosheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry with the Golden Rule, from Soul Train to Wall Street with Hilary Beard.
Earlier this summer, Heart Life Music was chosen to celebrate William Morrow’s Centennial as one of their 100 Books of Distinction. With 50 nonfiction and 50 fiction titles across the iconic publishing house’s history, it joined David Halberstam’s Summer of ’49, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, Bill Bryson’s Made in America and fiction that included The Lord of the Rings, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty and John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany.
“Every time something like this happens, I look around,” Chesney says of the honors. “All I wanted to do was show people the path to making something you can’t know how to do, some incredible characters who shared so much life and wisdom with me – and a lot of fun within all the hard work. It’s hard to believe it all happened, and yet, I was there. Having people recognize the book? Well, that’s crazy, too.”
The freewheeling take on the superstar’s journey from small-town East Tennessee dreamer to commanding the largest stages across the nation through the songs that defined coming of age in the 21st century celebrated places long gone, drew on unexpected musical sojourns in Jamaica, the Kremlin, New England and Cabo San Lucas, and of course drifted across the waters of the Caribbean, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. For Chesney, who encountered and collaborated with heroes, it was always about finding common ground and reinforcing the human heart – and Heart Life Music delivered on all three.
Last week, Chesney and Gleason also received a National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards nomination for Best Book (nonfiction). Both nominations are the first for the Country Music Hall of Fame member.
One of contemporary American music's biggest names, Kenny Chesney has been selling out major stadiums across the nation for two decades; playing to over a million fans every summer since 2002, prompting Variety to pronounce “country music’s only true long-term stadium act.” He’s sold over 37 million albums and won the prestigious Entertainer of the Year eight times, as well as holding Billboard's record for the Most Country No. 1s with 34 chart-topping songs that defined coming of age in the flyover in the 21st century. The game-changing superstar became the first country artist to perform at the groundbreaking Sphere, taking No Shoes 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 moments, his popularity continues to grow year after year. 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.
