Kenny Chesney confessed that he may have sung about - and wrote songs about - women in a sexist way.
But now, the 46-year-old country star declared that those kinds of songs are no longer how he wants to portray women. He revealed he wants to say something different in his songs, instead of delivering lyrics that "objectify" women, according to Billboard.
"Over the last several years, it seems like anytime anybody sings about a woman, she's in cutoff jeans, drinking and on a tailgate--they objectify the hell out of them," Chesney told Billboard. "Twenty years ago, I might have written a song like that--I probably did. But I'm at a point where I want to say something different about women."
An example of a song that paints an image of a woman in the way Chesney now wants to present women - those who are independent and strong - is the song "Wild Child," which he co-wrote with Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, for his latest album, "The Big Revival." The song's chorus delivers much more depth about a woman than her appeal in faded cut-off jeans.
She's a wild child
Got a rebel soul with a whole lot of gypsy wild style
She can't be tied down but for a while
I'll be falling free and so in love
Might break my heart but God she drives me wild child
In fact, when Chesney went into the studio in 2013 intending to create an album completely unlike any he had ever recorded, he hit a wall.
"I would listen to the songs I'd recorded, and they were good, but I felt like we were repeating ourselves," he explained in his interview with Billboard.
Then, thanks to finding the album's first single, "American Kids," and co-writing "Wild Child," Chesney turned a creative corner. Suddenly, he was certain of the direction that he should take with the new album. A prime example was tapping rocker Grace Potter, who had previously joined him on the hit duet "You and Tequila," to expand "Wild Child" into a duet.
The musical epiphany he experienced got him revved up.
"I felt the excitement I needed to feel when I decided to take a year off," he said. Indeed, he had taken a year off of touring.
After his final live tour date in August 2013, he made the decision to spend a year off the road so that he could take his time recording "The Big Revival." Now, with the new musical path he was charting for the album, he feels vindicated that he had made the right decision to stay off the road to make new, different, perhaps more meaningful, music.
Chesney has acknowledged that he is aware of the ever-evolving career paths taken by two of his musical heroes -Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. He says he now knows that it is time to follow in their footsteps and allow for his own career path to evolve in a different direction.
Now that he's taken his music down a new road, and his ideas about how to present women in songs have changed, does Chesney see himself expanding his non-musical reach beyond launching his own brand of rum, Blue Chair Bay? Would he, for example, consider venturing into television, the way Blake Shelton has as a coach on "The Voice" and the way Keith Urban has as a judge on "American Idol?"
"I'm not knocking anybody that does it, but I just don't ever see myself doing it," he admitted to Billboard.
"Can you imagine Tom Petty being a judge on 'American Idol?'"
