Kenny Chesney loves being a singer, a songwriter and a performer on stage — he just doesn’t necessarily want the celebrity status that accompanies those successes. The Tennessee native, by his own admission, has a complex and conflicting viewpoint on his level of fame, which was already climbing when he had his brief, ill-fated marriage to actress Renée Zellweger in 2005.

“That changed a lot,” Chesney admitted to Lon Helton, as part of the recent Country Radio Seminar (via Billboard). “What is interesting is we were playing stadiums already, and after that … I didn’t have social anxiety before that, [but] then you add our success and then you add that to your life and you have a little bit of social anxiety. And now, dealing with the way the world is today and how social everything is, and how information is transferred — yeah, you’d have to be crazy to want to be a celebrity today.”

With so much of people’s private lives now on public display, thanks in large part to the wide variety of social media platforms, Chesney works hard — very hard — to keep at least some of his life away from everyone else.

“I just don’t feel comfortable going down that road,” Chesney explained. “I work really hard to be this person, and I want to keep some sort of dignity and integrity intact, and not feel like I’m selling my soul to get higher in the consumption chart. I realize that the person I am today, some things are fair game. One of the reasons I’m so private is when my life started to change and people started caring at a different level, the only thing I could keep to myself was the intimate details of my life. Now everything else is fair game.”

Exacerbated by his celebrity status is his dismay that fallacies and half-truths run as predominantly as facts, something he can avoid in part by not making his private life accessible to others.

“Can people talk about you? They make stuff up, they run with it, the media runs with it,” Chesney shared. “People are really curious to know those intimate details, I get that. But the reason I’m so private is that if I don’t keep those details to myself, where do I go? What else do I have?”

The 54-year-old, who spends much of his time off of the road at his St. John home in the Caribbean, is working on a new album, and vows to keep touring as long as he is able.

“I feel great and I still have the fire to go out there and give people every single thing I have,” Chesney said. “As long as I can be creative and do what I do at the level that I do it.”

Chesney’s latest album, Here and Now, was released in 2020. He will embark on his I Go Back Tour on March 25, with Kelsea Ballerini serving as his opening act. Find music and tour dates at KennyChesney.com.