In defense of those not fully paying attention, it's true that Chesney's long list of hits includes titles like "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problem," "Beer in Mexico," and "Keg in the Closet." And on the strength of that image, he has built one of the most successful careers in country music history, with over 30 million albums sold and more than 30 Top Ten country singles. With the support of his dedicated fans, known as the "No Shoes Nation," he was named Entertainer of the Year four times by both the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music. His tours fill stadiums from coast to coast.

Yet for his new album The Big Revival, Chesney made a tough decision. He chose not to go out on the road this year, but instead to allow himself more time in the studio to craft an ambitious set of songs, with the power and emotion that he feels is lacking in too much of today's country music - a condition the great Merle Haggard recently referred to as "too much boogie-boogie wham-bam and not enough substance."

"This album ain't about a party," Chesney says. "It's about living with passion, about confidence, about walking into a room full of people and smiling and meaning it. Having the courage to hear this voice in your head and follow it, maybe for the first time in your life. It's about taking your life and living it to the fullest."

Dressed in a V-neck t-shirt, chinos, and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, Chesney, age 46, sat down at Nashville's Acme Feed & Seed - a new restaurant and music venue in a renovated former feed supply warehouse at the end of downtown's Lower Broadway strip - to talk about his vision for the album and his goals at this stage of a two-decade-long ride at the top.

"It would have been very easy for us to make this record on a conveyor belt, because I've been guilty of that before," he says, using the first-person plural construction often heard from Nashville stars. "But I felt like I was at a place in my life, along with the deep relationship we have with the fans, where I deserve more and they deserve more. It was worth really digging into what I wanted the record to be and to see how I was going to take my audience to a place that maybe collectively we haven't been before. And that's hard to do - it's hard to take time off the road because it's a business, and for us it's really big business."

That's a bit of an understatement. Ticket sales to Chesney's 2013 tour topped $90 million for 44 shows, his tenth consecutive tour with over a million tickets sold. But after the final concert at Boston's Gillette Stadium on August 24, he made it clear to his band and his crew - the "us" that keeps his engine running - that he would be staying home for a while.

"It was the best decision I've ever made - for myself as an individual, my relationships, my friendships," he said. "I'm a lot easier to be around now. There was also a little bit of exhaustion in there, honestly, but I knew that this record had to be different, and I knew it was going to take some time."

Chesney chuckles, amused by the idea that after fifteen albums, he isn't content to keep a well-oiled machine running. "Being a creative person is a constant annoyance," he says. "It just is! Because you're never happy and you're always thinking-just when you think you have nothing to do, you think 'I'm not going to write a song today,' there's this thing�and I shouldn't say annoyance, but it is. Sometimes you want to go 'Shut up, leave me alone.'

"But this time, I really wanted to push myself as a writer, an entertainer, an artist, a musician and not just rest on what we've accomplished and the success that we've had. That was the target."

Which is, in some ways, a relatively easy thing to say. After all, Chesney's last album was the introspective, singer-songwriter-oriented Life on a Rock, on which he broke Nashville convention and wrote most of the material himself, exploring his experiences on the island of St. John, his regular Caribbean retreat. Since attaining A-List stardom, he has often switched up his style between such blockbusters as When the Sun Goes Down and Hemingway's Whiskey and more left-field albums like Be Who You Are (Songs from an Old Blue Chair) or Just Who I Am: Poets and Pirates, and collaborations with such unexpected artists as Dave Matthews, the Wailers, and Grace Potter.

"A lot of things come with success - jealousy, negativity, stuff," concedes Chesney, "but with success also comes the ability to make a record every now and then like those." But now he was looking for something that could serve both purposes, something that would be personal and meaningful, yet also hit his fans hard and serve as a real anchor for the next tour.