Kenny Chesney wants his concerts to be for everyone. The 56-year-old opens up about the parallels he sees between his music career and sports, and why both matter more than people might think.

“Sports and music are the two places where they’re not going to be told what to believe,” Chesney says, in an interview for the Patriots Pregame Show. “Music in my concerts anyway. I have friends that use that platform, use their stage as a platform to tell people what to believe and how to think, and who to vote for. That’s never been a part of my life. I’ve always been the antithesis of that. And that’s the same as coming to watch the Patriots. They just want to win. They don’t want to be told what to think. And I think those two things are really very, very common with music and sports in my life.”

Chesney, who famously always ends his tours at the Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, might not be a superstar artist if he had been able to pursue his first love, which was football. Although he wasn’t able to become a professional football player, like some of his friends, the singer is a big fan of the sport, and what it represents. It’s also why he recorded “The Boys of Fall,” released in 2010 — and why he still performs the song today.

“I knew that my sports days were limited in high school,” Chesney admits. “I remember being in high school, my last game, and I just sat there forever, kept my cleats and my shoulder pads on, ’cause I knew when I took them off, that was it, forever. I think the song, ‘Boys of Fall’ got into a lot of the core of family values. I feel like that a lot of families and communities that lean on the sports teams, I felt like that song was one of the songs that just touched the DNA of our life. And I grew up in that community. There are a lot of communities, and Foxborough is one of those communities, and New England has a lot of those communities.”

Photo Credit: Rick Diamond

“When I grew up, we had certain things to lean on, and that was church, and that was school, music and football,” he continues. “When I heard ‘Boys of Fall,’ a guy named Casey Beathard wrote that song … It was a really authentic song about Casey’s life, and ended up being a really universal song about a lot of our lives.”

Chesney wrapped up his Sun Goes Down Tour in August, with three sold-out shows in New England. The East Tennessee native acknowledged he was sad to see his Sun Goes Down Tour, which also included Zac Brown Band, Megan Moroney and Uncle Kracker come to an end.

“The last night is always so hard, because you’ve shared so many things over a few months,” Chesney said ahead of his final show. “You get close, you have fun, and you live. But this year, this tour has been even more so because every single person who came to see us brought just as much heart to the shows as my road family and I brought. It was something you could feel everywhere we went.”

Chesney has a Top 30 hit right now with “Just To Say We Did.” The song is from his latest BORN album, released earlier this year.

“It truly is a part of my DNA, my life experiences, but it doesn’t have to be the experiences that we describe in the song,” Chesney said. “It can be anything you do with friends, with family — whatever it is to create connection and the intimate details that later in life that you’re going to look back on.”

Find Chesney’s music at KennyChesney.com.