Songoftheday 07/29/24 - All he could think about was "I'm too young for this, got my whole life ahead"...
"There Goes My Life" - Kenny Chesney
from the album When The Sun Goes Down (2004)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #29 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 10
Today's song comes from country music A-lister Kenny Chesney, whose sixth studio album No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem had spun off five hit singles between 2002 and 2003, four of which crossed over to reach the top-40 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart with "Young", "The Good Stuff", "Big Star", and "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problems". Later that year, he put out a holiday album, All I Want For Christmas Is A Real Good Tan, which just missed the top-40 on the Billboard 200 sales tally at #42, and went on to sell over a million copies. Seven of its eleven tracks got enough airplay to place on the Country Songs radio chart, with the title track reaching #30.
Chesney returned with the lead single from his next regular studio release on BNA Records When The Sun Goes Down. "There Goes My Life", written by Neil Thrasher and Wendell Mobley, is one of those "gentle pun" parable songs. This time it covered a very young man thrown into fatherhood, initially with the fear that his big dreams of getting away and enjoying life was now permenantly on hold. It takes until verse three where his daughter has consumed his heart but not his happiness. The bridge flips the script as she is leaving for a life of her own following the dreams he originally though he gave up, with the "there goes my life" taking that different meaning (but hey, what about your wife, Kenny?). The production from Chesney with Buddy Cannon is reverent and powerful at the right moments without the bombast it could have sported. And with Chesney's pleasant (if nasal) vocals take the chord change challenges with stride. All and all it's a poignant start to an album in an atmosphere of big brash party songs, which was a great change of pace for the end of the year...
In return, "There Goes My Life" spent seven weeks at #1 on Billboard's Country Songs airplay chart, matching his personal best with "The Good Stuff", while making the top-40 on their Hot 100 all-genre list in December of 2003. The When The Sun Goes Down album, released in February of 2004, spent a week at #1 on the Billboard 200 and fourteen at the top of the Country Albums list, spending two years on the latter and going on to sell over five million copies (matching his previous best-selling Greatest Hits collection in 2000).
Kenny and the album will be back to the series.
(8/10)
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's Kenny in concert behind the album...
and lastly, with the song's co-writer Wendell Mobley...
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