“The Good Stuff”
Kenny Chesney
Written by Jim Collins and Craig Wiseman
Radio & Records
#1 (7 weeks)
July 26 – September 6, 2002
Billboard
#1 (7 weeks)
July 27 – September 7, 2002
The islander image was so firmly established with the No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems aesthetic that it’s easy to forget that the title track was the final single from that set.
The image would be essential in establishing an identity for Kenny Chesney in the larger pop culture landscape, but it was a good old-fashioned country ballad that made his career go supernova.
It was just fantastic timing. His Greatest Hits album had successfully recontextualized his career up until that point, helping listeners to finally connect him in their minds with all of his big radio hits from the previous years.
They were ready for a career record from Chesney, and they got one. “The Good Stuff” is an incredible song. It’s heavily influenced by the plotline of “Chiseled in Stone,” but it takes a different approach toward tugging your heartstrings.
“The Good Stuff” was released several years before the Pixar classic Up, which used a collection of small vignettes from a marriage to tell the story of a relationship from its origins until death do they part.
This song uses the same approach so effectively, and it has a similar emotional impact on me. It’s always the burnt dinner part that wrecks me, much like in Up, it’s the subtle reference to a lost child that hits me harder than the wife’s eventual death. It’s because of the compassion on the husband’s face in the movie, and the very specific way he empathizes with her through his actions and without words.
The stakes may not be as high at the dinner table, but the way this husband protects his new wife’s feelings through asking for seconds is just so damn beautiful:
And it’s the way that she looks with the rice in her hairEating burnt suppers the whole first yearAnd asking for seconds to keep her from tearing upYeah, man, that’s the good stuff
It gets me every time. It really is the good stuff.
Chesney’s superstar era begins in earnest here. It won’t be my favorite years of him as a singer. I prefer both his youthful high pitched exuberance of his early career and his more recent gravitas-laden vocals on his newest material over his rather ordinary sound during this decade.
But man, did the guy have great taste in material sometimes, and this is one of the best examples of how a perfectly constructed song can be brought home by a good enough singer with a clear sense of his limitations and exquisite instincts for song selection.
“The Good Stuff” gets an A.
Every No. 1 Single of the 2000s
Previous: Toby Keith, “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” |
Next: Darryl Worley, “I Miss My Friend”
It’s as solid good song. “B”. No complaints but just not a song I would reach for and not worthy of a 7-week run at the top, but I guess this was the best Nashville had to offer at this time?
I’m at a loss as to why 2002-me HATED this song, because I don’t ever recall articulating why. It’s easily one of my favorites of his now.
Some of the best country music songs, in my opinion, come from sympathetic and real portrayals of older people. “In My Next Life” by Merle Haggard, “Remembering” by Ashley Campbell, etc. This is a fantastic story crammed full of detail, portraying the “old man at a bar” as a very real person with his own bittersweet story to tell. I feel like I’ve met that exact guy many times, even though I almost never go to bars.
Very good song – not among my favorite Chesney but good nevertheless – solid B+
I think having guys at bars drinking milk and bands singing about sippy cups of milk, soured my opinion of country music at the time.
And this from a guy from Minnesota of which the state drink is milk.
More than having strong song-sense, I find myself wondering if Chesney just got lucky from time to time given the preponderance of utterly forgettable material on which he built his career.
The songwriters deserve all the credit here. Is there an artist who couldn’t deliver the emotional impact of all the wonderful narrative details the lyrics offer?
The song is a gem. Chesney had the good fortune to sing it.
Disclaimer: I had these set to post last week and attempted three times, apparently unsuccessfully. Not sure why because the same method worked for me for Brad Paisley and Toby Keith preceding it. I’ll chime in again here now a week too late…..
If Vern Gosdin had recorded “The Good Stuff”, my score would rival yours. The same would likely be true to some degree with most of the male recording stars of the era. Even a modest vocalist of Tim McGraw’s caliber probably would have made this work. Unfortunately, Kenny Chesney recorded it, and put forth a vocal performance so entirely devoid of emotional resonance that he manages to make these lyrics fall flat as a pancake for me. In no way should these lyrics sound dull, but Chesney manages to pull it off. My frustration with his seven-week stay at the top of the charts played as much of a role in distancing me from the musical genre that I loved in 2002 as “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” did for you.
A good comparison, at least in my mind, is “The Good Stuff’s” chart contemporary, Joe Nichols’ “The Impossible”. Both were great songs and touched upon some of the same themes, but at least in the writers’ room, “The Good Stuff” was probably more of a homerun. But the emotional connection between Chesney and Nichols was night and day. It still irritates me that “The Impossible” fell short of the penthouse while Chesney spent half the summer there. While I’ll be dumping on Chesney more than my share this decade, I promise I don’t hate the guy. As I’ve said before, I think his beach persona was a better fit for his lackluster vocal salesmanship than dark or heady ballads, so he’ll have some partially redeeming moments ahead, at least more than I thought was possible in the summer of 2002 when he managed to turn a great song like “The Good Stuff” into wallpaper and simultaneously dominate the airwaves with said dullness.
Grade: C
I’m hearing this song for the first time today and my first thought is that it sounds highly derivative of something from the past that came before it: “Don’t Get Me Started” by Rhett Akins.