Kenny Chesney has covered a lot of ground – and he believes he’s got a lot more ground to go. The triple and reigning Academy of Country Music and two time and current Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year sold more tickets in North America than anyone last year, played football stadiums and sang the songs that capture the way the people of the fly-over live their lives, dream their dreams and feel the moments that define them.

“I’ve been through a lot …” says the Luttrell, Tennessean with the philosophical calm of a pilgrim who knows the very best music comes from the accrual of one’s experiences. “I’ve lived a lot, tasted a lot. I’ve laughed a lot, hurt a lot, looked for answers, found more questions, had some moments to remember – and I think all that comes through when I open my mouth and sing.

“And as a singer, I don’t push a lot, I just let it come,” he continues, trying to define the way he inhabits a song from the places most people miss. “It weeds the songs a lot quicker: I have to make ‘em believable. I know as soon as I start singing, if it feels true to me, if I can bring it home – literally and figuratively. If it doesn’t feel honest or true, then, well … I’ve let some pretty good songs go.”

photo courtesy of RCA Label Group

Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates is in many ways Chesney’s most intimate album to date. Still marked by the high jinks and good-time revelry he’s known for – the tropical feeling morning-after introduction of “Got a Little Crazy,” the shimmering, wide-open embrace of being young and free of “Just Not Today” – but the musical synthesis and emotional openness could’ve only come from a life lived in, around, making and loving music.

“Take a song like ‘Never Wanted Nothing More,’” he acknowledges with a laugh, “That is everything about who I am as a musician. I played – heck, I went to Russia with a bluegrass band, and I loved my Southern rock; both those things are right there in the heart of that song! Maybe it takes playing as many shows, sitting on as many barstools working for tips as I have for it all to fall together.

“I mean, I don’t think I could’ve said ‘let’s take bluegrass and add Southern rock.’ That wouldn’t have worked. But it all becomes part of you – and when you start really going to the core of the song, if you’ve got all this music inside you, well, the songs take you where the music suits them best.”

Whether it’s the burning honky-tonk rock of Dwight Yoakam’s full-tilt “Wild Ride,” featuring a kamikaze guitar part from Joe Walsh; the rubber-bottomed calypso-rhythms of the George Strait duet, “Shiftwork,” that’s pure Texas shuffle with steel drums; or the swirling tension of the smoky stripper’s reality check, “Dancin’ for the Groceries,” there is a new depth, a new kind of country coming from the shy, soft-spoken musician.

“There were a lot of roads we went down, we didn’t even realize we were going down,” he confesses of the process. “That’s the thing about how far I’ve come: you start living in the music, in the songs – and it changes everything. I couldn’t have pulled these songs off four or five years ago. I could sing ‘Shiftwork’ and hit all the notes, but it wouldn’t have been the same. I mean, they’d’ve sounded good, but would they be as believable? I don’t know … and that’s the thing for an artist, you want to go farther, be brave; that only comes from experience and living.”

Certainly one need only listen to the halting apology of a man who knows he’s built to fade, “Better as a Memory,” to hear both the nakedness of knowing one’s limit and recognizing sometimes the kindest thing to do is not get carried away in the emotion or the moment.

“I didn’t consciously get out of bed and go, ‘Okay, I’m gonna open my heart and soul up to everybody …’” Chesney says of the more personally revelatory songs. “But a couple of these made me realize what I am, what my reality really is right now.

“The most personal is ‘Better as a Memory,’ hands down. It’s the most brutally honest song I’ve ever recorded – and that song is a letter I’ve written several times. If I didn’t do a song like that, or ‘Demons,’ I wouldn’t be pushing myself as an artist – or a person. The people who buy my records, who love this music, I think they can take that honesty. I want them to feel they got a piece of me, who I am – and having looked out at those faces, maybe even learn a little bit about who they are, too.”

“Demons,” from the pen of Jon Randall and Opry legend Bill Anderson, is a catalogue of the vices that get a hold and never quite let go. Like “You Scare Me,” co-written by Rascal Flatts’ Joe Don Rooney, it’s a song of recognition, the knowing that things will never be the same, that once you know, you can’t not know … and in that awareness, there is a freedom.

“Some of the songs on this record are the kind that made me want to move to Nashville in the first place,” says the man who got his start as a staff songwriter at the legendary Acuff-Rose, once Hank Williams’ publisher. “I was looking for more … Given the pace, it would’ve been easy to make the same record, but everything in my world’s gone through such intensity, I wanted to show that.

photo courtesy of RCA Label Group

“Feeling more solid in my skin as an artist when I went in this time,” he continues, “I wasn’t afraid to reach for something that wasn’t obvious. Sure, there are hits on here … That is what I do, but that’s not really all of it. I mean, I’m a pretty fair songwriter, but I was harder on myself as a songwriter on this record – and I wrote some pretty good songs, but they weren’t good enough.”

Ironically, the yearning “Take Me There,” which Chesney had considered for this project, ended up as Rascal Flatts’ lead single for the follow-up to their quadruple-Platinum Me and My Gang. Part of the sorting and seeking that colored Just Who I Am no doubt stems from his recent stint co-producing Willie Nelson’s 2008 Lost Highway release, which features songs from Guy Clark, Randy Newman, Kris Kristofferson, Dave Matthews, Bob Dylan and Nelson himself.

“Willie inspired me in a lot of ways,” acknowledges the man who can hold 50,000 people riveted in an NFL football stadium. “As a songwriter, as an artist, as a singer – and as a man. I learned about how to live your life just watching him, not to take yourself so seriously, but at the same time to be a total music man. Talk about an inspiration.”

There is a moment in every superstar’s career when their fame is undeniable. That is the moment when they either make a decision to stay grounded in where they come from or the centrifugal force of the success hurls them into a place so far removed from the rest of us, they’re impossible to relate to.

Kenny Chesney, who lived for playing Friday night football, raised by a beauty shop owner, watching Keith Whitley alone in a field and shouting with his teenage buddies at Def Leppard, couldn’t take the disorientation of that rarified air. It’s why he’s known to grab a gator and burn through the pre-show parking lots at his own shows to get a little taste of the tailgating and celebrating.

If he recognizes that living at the speed of light may for the moment make him “Better as a Memory,” he’s not going to let go of the thrill of first trucks, times, promises or faith, which is what fires “Never Wanted Nothing More” with such a deep-seated intensity. Somewhere between back when and tomorrow, Kenny Chesney is singing songs that tell his truth and remind a whole lotta people, who’re more like him than not, about the things that matter, that hold up, that create the reasons to believe – and that’s not a bad place for a man who lives in songs to be.

“The more people I get to see in front of me – whether it’s at a football stadium or a funky little bar like the Hog’s Breath in Key West – the more I realize how much we all have in common. There are a lot of people punching a clock or having too much on their plate, a buncha people on their first date, with that nervousness and excitement that they’re really there ... we all want the same things, all hope for the same stuff and I feel like pretty much worry about the same stuff, too.

“When you look at it like that, what other kind of record could you make?”

Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates. Yeah, it was time … and the artist was ready.