Welcome To The Fishbowl

Kenny Chesney is calling his 13th studio album Welcome to the Fishbowl, and USA TODAY gets the first look at the new album's cover. Chesney says the title of the album came from a conversation he had with some of his football-playing friends at a beach bar called The Red Bar in Grayton Beach, Fla. "We walked in, and it was packed," Chesney recalls. "There was about 20 minutes of people coming up, saying hello, wanting to get something signed. "After that died down, one of those guys said, 'I didn't realize your life was like this.' I said, 'Hey, man, welcome to the fishbowl.' As soon as I said it, I realized that I was going to write a song about how our world and our culture is shrinking." Chesney insists that the song isn't necessarily about celebrity. "In fact, at the end of the song I speak to celebrities and say, 'You asked for this,' " he says. "But you don't have to be in the public eye for your business to be everybody's business. And that's just the way it is." When it comes to the songs on Fishbowl, Chesney recalls a different conversation, one he had with Matraca Berg, the co-writer of his 2010 hit You and Tequila. Berg told Chesney that he was at a point in his career where he could cut both great songs and songs that would fill football stadiums. "I think that's what I'm enjoying about this part in my career," he says, "and the new album's going to show that even more. Not a lot of artists, especially if they're as mainstream as me, have that freedom." The album will hit shelves 17 days after Chesney and Tim McGraw kick off their Brothers of the Sun tour in Tampa on June 2. The two singers will perform together on Sunday's Academy of Country Music Awards telecast (8 p.m. ET/PT, CBS). "We start rehearsing (for the tour) after the ACMs, and we start piecing it all together," says Chesney, who expects to include at least three songs from Fishbowl in his set. "I try to fill my sets full of songs that everybody lives with every day. To play a new song in a stadium, you might lose people. They might tune out for three minutes. But I'm at a point in my life where I want to play them new music. I want them to know we might do Fishbowl and a couple more.