When Kenny Chesney first recorded “The Tin Man“, it was for his debut In My Wildest Dreams album. Written by Chesney, along with Stacey Slate and David Lowe, the song is the second single Chesney ever released.
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“The Tin Man” follows “Whatever It Takes”, a song that did not do well at radio. When Chesney released “The Tin Man”, he had high hopes that it would be his breakout single. Unfortunately, it was not the radio success Chesney hoped it would be.
It wasn’t until Chesney’s fourth single, “Fall In Love”, from his sophomore All I Need To Know record, that Chesney began to have hits at radio. A Top 10 single, “Fall In Love” began Chesney’s country music climb, although it took him three years and several more singles after “The Tin Man” until he had his first No. 1 hit, with “She’s Got It All”.
Fortunately for Chesney, once he started having hits, they kept coming. So in 2001, Chesney released the song again, as part of his Greatest Hits record. Although it did not make it all the way to the top of the charts, “The Tin Man” did become a Top 20 hit for Chesney.
The Story Behind Kenny Chesney’s “The Tin Man”
“The Tin Man” might not be as big of a commercial success as some of his other songs. But it’s “The Tin Man” that helped get him his first publishing deal, and his first recording contract. For Chesney, without “The Tin Man”, he might not have ever become a country music superstar.
“That was the first song I wrote shorter than five or six minutes,” Chesney tells The Tennessean. “The song leads everything. That was burned into my psyche early on when I first moved to Nashville.”
“The Tin Man” is about wishing you didn’t feel pain. The song says, “It’s times like these / I wish I were a tin man / You could hurt me all you wanted / And I’d never even know / I’d give anything just to be the tin man / And I wouldn’t have a heart, and I wouldn’t need a soul.” Sadly for Chesney, the song’s inspiration is personal. He wrote the song when a girl he was dating moved away.
“I was pretty upset about it, “Chesney tells American Songwriter. “And I happened to be watching Wizard of Oz, and I saw the Tin Man go through the whole movie…wanting a heart. Finally, he gets one. It is when Dorothy leaves. He says in the movie, ‘Now I know I have a heart because it is breaking.’ He only thought that there was a good side to having a heart. First thing he finds out is that there’s is a downside to it too. That just hit me deep.”
In 2017, Miranda Lambert released “Tin Man”, a song she says was inspired by Chesney’s song.
Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
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