Kenny Chesney Squashes Gay Rumors & George Strait Earns His 54th Number One

There are only seven days left in the Last of The Breed ticket contest, so if you’re planning on entering you better do it now. Only six people are entered at the moment and it’s still anyone’s contest to win if they really want it. Update: This contest has ended. Congratulations to the winners.

• Kenny Chesney told 60 minutes that he is not gay. He said fraud was used as the reason for annulment because he didn’t realize what it was like to really be married. Seems like a sketchy excuse to me, I mean how much different can being married be from being in a serious relationship?
  

  Chesney, who is set to go on tour this summer, says he has no regrets.

  ‘Not at all. Not one bit,’ he says. ‘Even though I’d sit here and say I wish we’d gotten divorced instead of all that annulment stuff, and saved me a lot of public humiliation … I still don’t have any regrets. I loved her, you know? And it was real.’

• Clay Walker compares releasing new songs to being a quarterback in the NFL:
  

  “It’s like an NFL quarterback,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Brett Favre or Peyton Manning, you still have to go out every week. And when you lose a game it’s kind of like if one of your records doesn’t make it to the top of the charts. You’re like, ‘That doesn’t feel good. I never want that to happen again. What can I do to keep that from happening?’ Every song is a new game, and you have to go put on the uniform and go play.”

  I’d say the guy has had a fair amount of success, he’s probably a Brett Favre caliber singer.

• George Strait nabbed his 54th number one hit for his song “I Just Comes Natural.” That’s a pretty incredible feat, especially considering he has a lot of years ahead of him.
• It’ always nice to hear about celebrities giving to charity, which is exactly what Gretchen Wilson did. She played in five cities at smaller venues to bring in more than $163,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Make-A-Wish Foundation.
• I’ve heard, and enjoyed, a few of Jeff Bate’s previous songs, but I never knew anything about the guy. Quad City Times has a nice article about Jeff that talks about him wanting out of his big label contract, which he was granted, and what he’s up to at the moment.
  

  “What makes this all worthwhile and makes the dream worth living and able to attain is the fans, and the people who love the music,” he said. “They not only know the words of the songs and sing them back to them, but it touches their lives. To be able to make a connection on that level makes every mile, every minute away from home, every disappointment and every drop of sweat worth it.”

  via Country Nation

• NCTimes.com has another nice article about Todd Snider. He discusses how some of his life experiences have helped him write better songs, his current tour that consists of him, his wife, and his manager, and a little tangent about Bush.
  

  Until his wife reminded him of the impetus of the story. Snider and his brother had gone to a party by a lake near San Marcos, Texas, when a bunch of frat guys wanted to fight, picked out his brother and broke his jaw.

  “She reminded me about the first time I saw Bush in the debates and that smirk he has,” Snider said. “And how seeing him on TV had reminded me of the guys who attacked me and my brother.”

  Not that Snider was a saint as a kid.

  “I had a semester in high school when I was inside that frat mentality,” he said. “I spent a little time backstage with the bullies. By my junior year I was out of it, though. Still, when you look back, some kids have no choice. Maybe that’s what happened to Bush. I don’t know.”

  That last part struck me as kind of odd, but to each his own.