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They say it’s the summer of country. 2024 has already seen two of Earth’s biggest pop stars pivot toward country and suddenly, Seattle went from having one country radio station to three, literally overnight. And just this week, as Seattle welcomes its first stadium country bash of the summer, two crossover country songs — Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and the Post Malone-Morgan Wallen team-up “I Had Some Help” — sat atop the mainstream charts.

That’s all well and good. But the tens of thousands of Kenny Chesney fans who flocked to Lumen Field on Saturday like seagulls to the waterfront Ivar’s couldn’t care less about which pop stars are cooking up country-ish records or whether country music is having “a moment.” The catchy twangified sounds have been the predominant popular music and a lifestyle reflection for roughly half the country since forever and will continue to be whether or not Posty keeps his Stetson on .



Over the last 20 years of his career, Chesney, country music’s king of summer, has cultivated a crossover sound of his own, blending his true-Wrangler-blue country roots with the island rock motif popularized by Jimmy Buffett, who died of skin cancer last year. Zac Brown Band, Chesney’s first mate on his Sun Goes Down Tour — a stadium run that ought to travel by cruise ship — is similarly indebted to the late aloha-shirted great and together, the country heavyweights offered a simpatico brand of white-sand escapism on a dark.

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