Jill Trunnell
hasn’t been home for more than three consecutive weeks in more than three and a half years. Her life is lived from one suitcase to another – from boarding passes to hotel rooms. But she wouldn’t have it any other way. As one of the primary tour coordinators for country icon and eight-time Entertainer of the Year Kenny Chesney, her life is always on the go, which satisfies an itch Trunnell has had ever since she was 18. By her account, she is and always will be a modern-day gypsy.
Though it’s extraordinarily extensive, this is a process that sometimes happens as much as five times per week, which is not the industry standard. “Most country tours are ‘weekend warriors’ where you do shows Thursday, Friday and Saturday and that’s it!” Trunnell relates. “And you come home on Sunday and revive, then travel out on Wednesday to do it again. But this year, Kenny did four or five shows a week,” which means at most, Trunnell had three days at home per week.
Trunnell, 44, has been working with Chesney for 12 years and has loved every minute of it. In her words, she is part of “air-traffic control” for the tour, along with six other members of the production team. They supervise all movements of the tour, including every detail of trucks, busses, catering, stagehands and more. They keep all the parts moving in the right direction, which, with 306 total members of the tour including supporting acts, is no easy job.
Due to her production duties, though, she usually would go weeks on end without returning home. On off days, Trunnell and those working in the production office frequently have to go on what are called site surveys for Chesney. “Say there’s a stadium that Kenny’s never played before,” she poses. “The show can’t go on sale or even start getting designed or built until we’ve gone there and physically seen it … You have to worry about sightlines for the fans to make sure we’re not selling tickets in a place where the fans won’t get the optimal experience.”
And with that many pieces that need to perfectly fall into place, every day can be different. “It kind of depends on what’s coming up,” Trunnell describes of her day-to-day duties. “You’re always working ahead to build that show and have every aspect ready from the catering to being prepared for guests – one show we might only have 20 or 30 guests and one show we might have 300 guests, and that affects meals, parking, tickets, passes, credentials to get everybody in and hotel rooms for family members. The list goes on and on.” On a show day, at 7 a.m., the team begins marking out the space and doing the rigging. The first trucks then start loading in at 8 a.m. “We go into a building that’s an empty shell and create our little city,” Trunnell explains. The team has until 6 p.m. – or sometimes 4 p.m. – to be ready to open the doors and await the arrival of anywhere from 20,000 to 60,000 eager fans. Then, once the show starts, Trunnell’s job still isn’t over as she’s become the official photographer for Chesney’s performances; she literally works all day and all – or at least most of -- the night.
FALL 2015
And there’s a lot of fans who want that experience. Kenny Chesney tours roughly February through early September every year and consistently sells out each venue he plays. The star plays an average of 15 to 25 NFL football stadiums per year, all of which sell out in minutes. To close his most recent tour, “The Big Revival Tour,” Chesney played Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, with fan attendance of 120,206 over two nights. The first show sold out in three minutes and the second in five. The two shows combined grossed $11.6 million, while the tour as a whole grossed $114 million and drew over 1.3 million fans. “There are fans that might come to 10 or 15 shows across the country every single year,” Trunnell reveals of Chesney’s legions of fans known as the No Shoes Nation. “It’s goosebump moments when people see what Kenny does in these NFL football stadiums. He speaks to every single fan, like eye-toeye contact that a lot of other people just don’t do.” Though she is truly living a dream right now, looking back on where she was 25 years ago, Trunnell
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