KENNY CHESNEY’S SUN GOES DOWN 2024

It looked like Raymond James Stadium’s famed pirate ship was rocking on a sea of humans, hands in the air as Kenny Chesney delivered two hours of back-to-back life-affirming hits to a beyond sold out crowd at his Sun Goes Down 2024 tour kick-off. With 60,529 tickets sold – including an unprecedented wave of standing room only tickets in the North Zone Plaza – the audience seemed as hungry for the East Tennessee songwriter/superstar’s music as Chesney was to throw it all down on that stage.
 
It was a night of surges and highlights. Telling the packed crowd they’d been in rehearsals since February and were so glad to be playing for actual human beings, the audience cheered even harder. Often it felt like a competition to see who could out-love the other, as the audience pulled an extra last chorus of “American Kids” and sang so loud it poured onto the stage during “The Good Stuff.”
 
From the moment Chesney came down the drum riser, the band full-tilt into “Living in Fast Forward,” it was obvious they’d come to play hard. A cascade of “Beer In Mexico” into “Keg in the Closet” into the five guitars blazing “KC/DC” march down the T, bringing the music as close to No Shoes Nation as possible, the momentum never stopped. Whether the sexy “Somewhere with You,” the countryfied Chris Stapleton-penned “Never Wanted Nothing More” or the gulp life down “Til It’s Gone,” it was song forward, muscular music sent into the near perfect night.
 
“You think about it, you anticipate, you wait – and no matter how many times you’ve done this,” Chesney marveled after the show, “there is nothing like the way that crowd hits you. They came to sing, to cheer and just love the night, and they sure did.”
 
With the cars wrapped all the way around the stadium before 9 a.m. and folks in line not much later, No Shoes Nation came ready. Tiki bars, pirate flags, corn hole courts, grills’n’blenders and sundry skeletons created a tableau in the parking lot that was distinctly redolent of Chesney’s poets and pirates reality. That sense of friendship extended to the stage as well.
 
When Uncle Kracker emerged from the wings for “When The Sun Goes Down,” their multiple week No. 1, the crowd erupted in shrieks seeing the two friends reunited. As the song came to a close, production manager Ed Wannebo rambled onstage with the ceremonial massive margarita; but instead of one giant tumbler, he had a pair. With a toast, a drink and a laugh, they two shared Kracker’s remake of Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” again with the crowd singing along full voice.
 
“Nobody sings like No Shoes Nation,” the man deemed “the King of the Road” by the Wall Street Journal and “country’s king of stadium concerts” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “When I hear those voices coming back at us, how much they mean these songs, I feel like I’m home, and home is a really good place to be.”
 
Once again, presented by Blue Chair Bay® Rum, Sun Goes Down 2024 brings all the high velocity energy and songs people know by heart back to America’s favorite football stadiums.