Thought she was getting a new daughter-in-law?
Kenny Chesney has always been fairly private with his dating life. He had a short-lived marriage to actress Renée Zellweger back in 2004, which lasted only four months before the couple split and filed to have their marriage annulled. Since then, we really haven’t heard much about any of Kenny’s romantic partners, with the country music superstar obviously preferring to keep that part of his life private.
Of course that often leads to rumors and speculation…like when he teamed up with Grace Potter for “You and Tequila” back in 2010.
The song was written by Matraca Berg and Deana Carter, and released as the fourth single from Chesney’s album Hemingway’s Whiskey. While it only peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, it’s been certified 4x Platinum by the RIAA and arguably been a bigger song for Kenny than some of the #1 singles from the album like “Reality” and “Live A Little.”
In his new book, Heart Life Music, Kenny recalls getting the demo for the song in his inbox in the middle of the night after Berg “had been drinking red wine with a friend” and was “drunk enough to send it across the internet into my inbox.”
Well Chesney was sold on the song, but needed a female duet partner. And as it turns out it was Berg who suggested Potter, a rock and pop singer who at the time was the lead singer of Grace Potter & the Nocturnals.
According to Chesney, the addition of Potter left fans of both artists questioning the duet, but he knew she was the right choice for the song:
“I knew we were aligned. She sounded like coming home.”
He says that even before the song was mixed he knew that had created something special. And in early 2011, the two teamed up again for a flirtatious music video to go along with their duet.
In fact it was so flirtatious that it led many – including Kenny’s own mother, Karen Chandler – to speculate that he and Grace Potter were a real-life couple or had some kind of relationship going on.
As he writes in the book:
“Anyone who’s ever seen that video assumes we were having sex. Even Mom thought we were sleeping together, but that wasn’t true. The chemistry comes from our gypsy souls, our desire to chase music where it takes us and disappear into places we can be still.”
While there isn’t anything romantic between them (Potter has been married to her second husband, producer Eric Valentine, since 2018), Kenny and Grace have remained close friends since recording their first song together.
Potter went on tour with Kenny for his 2011 Brothers of the Sun Tour, a co-headlining tour with Tim McGraw, and they had another duet together, “Wild Child,” on Kenny’s 2014 album The Big Revival. Kenny also appeared on a version of the Grace Potter & the Nocturnals song “Stars,” which was released as a bonus track on their 2012 album The Lion The Beast The Beat.
More recently, Grace appeared with Kenny earlier this year during his residency at the Las Vegas Sphere to perform a duet of “You and Tequila.”
Just two good friends and kindred spirits, nothing more – despite what Kenny’s mom may have thought.
