2006 was another pinnacle in the seemingly unstoppable career of the country superstar, but it also may have been his most frustrating time as an artist ? and a person.

Chesney was still reeling from his very public breakup of his brief marriage to Academy Award-winner Renee Zellweger (and the tabloid frenzy that followed), and felt particularly uninspired, even when it came to what he loved most ? touring.

“I wasn’t mentally ready to go on the road, after all the media stuff that happened with the breakup with Renee, I just mentally wasn’t ready to go, so all last year, even though I had fun and the whole tour was amazing … mentally I just wasn’t 100 percent there,” he admits.

He was even reluctant to work on a follow-up to his multiplatinum 2005 album, “The Road and the Radio,” which featured such hits as “Beer in Mexico.”

“Last year at the CMA Awards … he said to me, `I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to get this record done; I don’t know what I want to say,’” Joe Galante, head of Sony Nashville, recalls Chesney saying.

Galante didn’t want to push his superstar to make a record he wasn’t ready to make. But he told him to take a crack at it, and see if something might give him inspiration.

Just as Galante suspected, the inspiration did come ? though not from the usual sources. Chesney, who has written or co-written tunes for all of his previous albums, found the most personal and profound songs for his new disc, “Just Who I Am: Poets and Pirates,” from the pens of others. The album, on sale Tuesday, doesn’t contain one song written by Chesney. Even so, he considers it perhaps the one that reveals his true emotions more than any other, especially with songs like “Wife and Kids,” where he wistfully yearns for the perfect family life that now eludes him, and “Better as a Memory,” in which he lists his own shortcomings as a mate.

“This record opens me up a little bit more, and I’m letting that happen more and more, and that’s tough for a guy like me, who’s constantly got a wall up,” says the congenial Chesney, relaxing at a Manhattan studio a few hours before a concert at Madison Square Garden.

“There’s a piece of me in all of these songs, there’s a whole lot of me in the majority of them,” he continues. “`Better as a Memory,’ that’s probably one of the most brutally honest songs that I’ve ever recorded about me, and it’s a letter that I’ve probably written to a lot of girls before.”

As Galante puts it: “I think he let people into the issues that are facing him.”

Part of this newfound introspection, and willingness to put more of his emotions out for public dissection, came after Chesney began working with a country great who has endured plenty of triumphs and setbacks in the public eye ? legend Willie Nelson. Chesney is the producer on Nelson’s next record, due out next year.

“Every artist feeds off inspiration, and when I needed it the most, God gave me Willie Nelson,” Chesney says.

When Chesney began working on the album in late 2006, he hadn’t started working on his own record, and admits to feeling “pretty stressed out.”