Paul Cauthen on Why He Calls Kenny ‘Mr. Chesney’

Paul Cauthen has earned a reputation for going hard. During the sweltering midday heat of Stagecoach 2024, he took the stage in a full-length fur coat. When his Country Coming Down album dropped with a billboard in Times Square, he jetted up from Texas just to see it in person. And on nearly every album he’s released, including the new Book of Paul, Cauthen has spit out a button-pushing lyric or two.

But Cauthen attributes some of that behavior to his larger than life persona, “Big Velvet.” In a new interview on Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, the Tyler, Texas, native recalls a quote that Kenny Chesney gave in an interview after he was asked if he acted the same in his daily life as he did onstage.

“‘How do you differentiate? You don’t seem like the same person as you are onstage,’” Cauthen recalls. “He said, ‘Well, hell no, I would hate to be that egotistical, over-the-top, think he’s cooler than anybody else performer all the time.’ He realizes that’s just the mojo onstage that people want. It brought it home, realizing we all bleed red. Stardom and being famous and all this stuff, I never bid on it.”

In other words, Cauthen leaves the “Big Velvet” energy on the stage and in the studio. But when he cut the song “Country As Fuck” for 2022’s Country Coming Down, the alter-ego was on full display, boasting about how he likes to be called “Lil Nas” and “Tim McGraw,” and how he was riding tractors before Kenny Chesney’s 1999 hit “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.” “Was driving tractors before it got sexy/Real cowboys don’t rock to Kenny Chеsney,” he sang with a wink.

Chalk that one up to Big Velvet, Cauthen suggests on Nashville Now. “I’ll say ‘Mr. Chesney,’ that’s how much respect I have for him,” he says.

Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Vince Gill, Lainey Wilson, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Kings of Leon, the Black Crowes, Carly Pearce, Brandon Lake, Breland, Bryan Andrews, Noeline Hofmann, Devon Gilfillian, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Ink, Rival Sons’ Jay Buchanan, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, Clever, and authors Marissa R. Moss, Josh Crutchmer, Mark Gray, and Jonathan Bernstein.

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