He Has a Way With the Ladies

You could whip up all sorts of complicated explanations for how country singer Kenny Chesney caught everyone outside his fan club and record company by surprise this month by landing his latest album at No. 1, not just on country charts but on pop charts as well.

But looking around during his concert Saturday at Blockbuster Pavilion in Devore, on his first headlining tour of arenas and amphitheaters, it was clear the answer boils down to one thing: women.

Women don’t just like Chesney. They loooove this buff 34-year-old out of little Luttrell, Tenn.

It’s not just his sex appeal, though, that’s a big factor in the rapid upward swing of his career arc in the last three years.

“His tractor is sexy,” said 23-year-old Lorie Sellas of Highland, one of thousands of young women happily salivating over Chesney on Saturday. “If he were three inches taller, I’d marry him.”

Women, outnumbering men three or four to one, were all smiles, singing along to lyrics you’d think they’d tattooed on their hearts--even those from the 3-week-old “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems” album.

As much as female fans hooted approval at his bicep-baring tight red tank top, many also kept urging him to lose it.

But even more than teasingly playful tunes, a la his 1999 hit “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,” what’s quietly turned Chesney into one of country’s new heavyweights is the hyper-romanticism of ballads such as “She’s Got It All,” “I Lost It” and his ode to lifetime commitment, “How Forever Feels.”

“Oh, my God,” said 19-year-old Meghan Hunt of Riverside, sitting on the grass far from the stage a few minutes before Chesney arrived. “He sings what women want to hear, and it’s all true too.”

Some critics have accused him of pandering to the young women in his audience, but to Chesney it’s catering, something that comes naturally to the son of a single mom with only one sibling, a half sister who is eight years younger.

“I saw the kind of stuff that my mom used to have to go through, so I’m sensitive to that,” Chesney said earlier in the week during an interview on the rooftop of his West Hollywood hotel, where he’d pulled up a chair to catch some early afternoon sun.

“Conway Twitty used to say he was singing all the things that women wanted to hear from their husbands and boyfriends that they could never say. In a way I’m sort of continuing that tradition.”

With the “No Shoes” album, however, Chesney, who also headlines Thursday at the Greek Theatre, feels he’s breaking from his own tradition.

“This is the first record I’ve ever done where I feel like there’s a little of me in every song. And there’s a lot of me in a lot of the songs,” he says. “On my other albums, there were maybe three or four things I really related to. Sometimes I’ve recorded a song because I thought it might be a great radio record.”

Two things made “No Shoes” different: extra time afforded him by a greatest hits album released after his previous studio album, “Everywhere We Go,” and new life realizations after he and his fiancee called off their engagement three years ago.

“When that didn’t happen, I went through a lot of soul searching,” he says.

“I think I grew up a little bit, and that can be hard for a guy. Losing something or someone you really love forces you to grow up, and I think these songs reflect the different maturity level I have in my life now, that I didn’t have when I recorded ‘Tractor.’”

Indeed, “No Shoes” includes songs that reflect on mistakes (“A Lot of Things Different”), that express appreciation for what one does have (“The Good Stuff”) and that express respect and love for another even when things didn’t work out (“On the Coast of Somewhere Beautiful”).

Perhaps the biggest stretch, for both Chesney and his audience, is his rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s “One Step Up,” from Springsteen’s 1987 “Tunnel of Love” album.

“I’ve always really loved the song, but I had no idea that one day I would painfully learn the lesson of it,” he says. “I almost recorded it a couple of albums back, but I’m glad I waited until I had lived it.”

He says he’s also glad his commercial success is happening now instead of earlier in a career that began nearly a dozen years ago. Thanks to the slow build before he posted two albums that have topped sales of 1 million apiece (“Everywhere” and “Greatest Hits”), Chesney thinks he’s better prepared for the attention he’s getting from his No. 1 debut on the Billboard Pop Albums chart.

Nevertheless, shortly before Billboard made it official, RCA Label Group Chairman Joe Galante took Chesney aside and gave him a little speech, based on what he’d witnessed when Alan Jackson accomplished the same feat earlier this year with his album “Drive,” propelled by the Sept. 11-inspired song “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).”

“I happened to be at a worldwide management meeting when that came out,” Galante says. “All of a sudden these [other music-industry executives] are all asking ‘Who ... is Alan Jackson?’ and Alan obviously was a much bigger star. So here’s this kid whose album is going to debut above all the hip-hop, alternative and rock releases. I knew people would pick up the paper and say ‘God Almighty, who is Kenny Chesney?’

“We [at RCA] knew it was coming, but nobody else seemed to pick up on it, including most people in Nashville,” Galante adds. “What Kenny did was through hard work. He’s got a great album, he puts on a great show and he’s put in years of hard work getting here. It’s like they say, he did it the old-fashioned way: He earned it.”

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Kenny Chesney will be joined by Montgomery Gentry and others Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Greek Theatre, 2700 Vermont Road, L.A. (323) 665-1927. $28.50-$59.50.