Imagine your friend invites you out on his boat. It’s a sunny Saturday, you’ve got a cooler, a group of buddies, and nowhere else to be. You head down to the dock and climb aboard a beautifully kept 45-foot Hatteras (look it up). You’ll crack a few beers and see where the day takes you.
Two beers later, you still haven’t left the dock. And now your friend’s dad is talking a little too much about the good old days. You can’t complain because it’s not your boat and you’re going to have some fun anyway. It’s just that the day didn’t quite take off the way you expected.
That’s Silver Sands Marina. It’s a cool boat that never leaves the dock.
To be fair, that’s the Kenny Chesney experience. The ballads are mostly built on dressed-up platitudes, and the fun songs are clever but harmless. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. Chesney’s catalog is mostly light fare that’s perfect for relaxing and can double as a lullaby as you pass out in your beach chair.
For most of his career, he’s built albums the same way: pick a theme, commit to it for about 80% of the album, and go a few inches deep.
The subject matter changes, but for the most part, the approach stays the same. The harmony stays safely away from chromaticism; the instrumentation is a rock band with the occasional tropical accent; and the melodies bob up and down like gentle surf coming ashore. It’s generally nice music. It’s filled stadiums for twenty years, and nobody has carried the torch for beach country’s saudade (that bittersweet, pleasure-you-suffer feeling) more faithfully.
It is tempting to say that Silver Sands Marina wades a little deeper into the ocean than Chesney is used to, but it’s actually swimming in the same waters as the terrific 2010 album, Hemingway’s Whiskey. Both albums are bookended with dramatic philosophical statements, filled with a mix of laid-back beach country, dabble in the introspective, and indulge in a little comic relief (see “Smell Y’all” and “Goldfish”).
That said, Silver Sands Marina does have some truly compelling moments. “Shot a Car Into Space” is the closest Chesney comes to saying something that you wouldn’t find framed on a beach house wall. It’s an intriguing anthology of miniature character studies. A “fella” launches a car into orbit (hmm, who could that be?). A rich neighbor has a big house that no one ever enters.
A hairdresser at the Holly Hills Mall hits the Powerball in ’97 and is back behind the chair two years later, a whole life in four lines. But then, we find ourselves living, laughing and loving in the chorus: “Blue collar, white collar / Don’t make a difference to a green dollar”. Sure, it’s an insight but not a very original or interesting one. For a song with an opening line that sets up higher artistic ambitions than is typical for Chesney, we quickly find ourselves in a familiar groove.
The best song on the album is “Goldfish” because it’s really what Chesney does best. It’s classic beach country: a light feel, a gentle guitar intro, and a lovely harmony from Lily Meola. It’s also the cleverest writing on the record. It’s fun to catalog animals that mate for life and never forget, ultimately setting up a narrator who wishes he had a goldfish’s memory so he could forget the one who left. The chorus piles on animal idioms (snug as a bug, happy as a clam, drunk as a skunk), and the clichés become the joke instead of the crutch. Quick aside: the three-second goldfish memory is a myth. Apparently they remember things for months.
So here we are. On the dock. Can we be blamed for expecting a spin around the harbor or a journey to a nearby island? Actually, yes. This captain has always kept us right where we feel the safest while still allowing us to have fun. Silver Sands Marina is indeed a decent place for an afternoon at the marina. You’ll have a few drinks, have some polite deep conversation, and go home sunburned and happy. You just won’t come back with much of a story.
