“You Had Me From Hello”
Kenny Chesney
Written by Kenny Chesney and Skip Ewing
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
September 18, 1999
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
September 10, 1999
Tom Cruise inspires a No. 1 country hit.
The Road to No. 1
After spending six weeks at No. 1 with “How Forever Feels,” Kenny Chesney topped the charts again with the second single from Everywhere We Go.
The No. 1
This is a shameless rewrite of “I Cross My Heart” with a cheesy line from Jerry Maguire further dragging down an already maudlin song.
An act of mercy would be to put Skip Ewing warning labels on every agonizingly corny ballad that he contributed to.
An embarrassment for all involved.
The Road From No. 1
Kenny Chesney is a talented artist that I’d rooted for since he released “Whatever it Takes” on Capricorn back in the early nineties. But I can fully understand how many wrote him off as a hack after “You Had Me From Hello” was followed by the astonishingly tacky “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,” which missed the top ten but sold him a metric ton of records. We’ll see Chesney often when we get to the 2000s and 2010s.
“You Had Me From Hello” gets an F.
Every No. 1 Single of the Nineties
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Chesney became untrustworthy to me as an artist with this song. Why, when he could reach such soaring highs with his best singles, would he turn around and drag the Cumberland river mud with stink-bait like this?
The obvious answer is to catch the bottom-feeders.
This song sounds insincere and contrived.
I won’t argue with an “F.”
In fact, something felt like it had decidedly “turned” when personality-less hits like this and Lonestar’s “Amazed” chased one another up the charts.
A Renee Zellweger inspired country crossover hit. Man we didn’t appreciate the irony fully at the time