The average country star of today might be a faceless drone, but who needs a face when you’ve got a hot body? That’s the question posed by today’s hottest Nashville star, Kenny Chesney — and I do mean posed. On the cover of his fifth studio album, No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem (BNA), the chart-topping singer turns to peer at the camera with his torso in three-quarter profile. He’s wearing a tight black sleeveless T-shirt, and his well-proportioned chest and upper arm are more central to the photo than his blandly handsome face, which looks disproportionately small in the shadow of his big black cowboy hat.

Chesney’s body was also the centerpiece of his hot show on a recent cool July evening at the Blossom Music Center, an outdoor amphitheater near Cleveland. Almost every time he swang his arms, emphasizing his sculpted biceps, or pumped his hips, emphasizing a tightly packed bulge that no Nautilus can shape, a sea of Ohio country girls responded with the kind of youthful shriek usually heard at ’N Sync concerts. And yet, both the show and the album make it clear that mama didn’t raise no pinhead pin-up. In fact, these days, ’N Sync might trade their phenomenal overnight pop success for Chesney’s skill at exploiting what country music has become since Garth Brooks identified suburban females as the genre’s biggest growth market.

More than a decade ago, country crossed over to housewives and secretaries who know nothing about red clay, white lightning, or bluegrass. Even so, Chesney addresses that market with a specialization that would have been unimaginable back then, when straitlaced neo-traditionalist Randy Travis was at the top of the country-beefcake pile. Like Travis, Chesney offers safe romanticism, but he takes it farther into the realm of female fantasy, practically abandoning the male perspective that makes Travis’s best songs endure (and that makes Alan Jackson’s Drive the straitlaced, neo-traditionalist triumph of the year). Which means his hits are often no better than a bad ’N Sync song. His tendency to let good-time fantasy run to flaccid cliché ruins his double-platinum Greatest Hits (BNA), a 2000 release whose banality is relieved only by the reliability of its pro forma pop hooks (and by the witty number "She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy"). The drums crash and boom, the pianos tinkle, the back-up singers are as slick as corporate CEOs, and true-love-forever wins out every time.

But on No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problem, Chesney plumbs the female fantasy of a good and faithful man so deeply, he comes out at an unexpected place — the wellspring of tragedy that eventually waters all our lives. The theme of aging drives the nostalgia of "I Remember," "Never Gonna Feel That Way Again," and "Live Those Songs," and it’s stated up front on "Dreams," a track about an older woman who loses her vision of true-love-forever. Even the up-tempo sing-along "The Good Stuff" ends in the cancer death of the narrator’s beloved wife. And on "A Lot of Things Different," the album addresses the inevitable concomitant of nostalgia and loss: regret. Like many a great country song, this perfect tearjerker upends a cliché with a simpler, harder truth: "People say they wouldn’t change a thing even if they could . . . but I would."

"This is one of my favorite songs I’ve ever recorded," Chesney revealed when he introduced it in concert, prepping his fans for the disc’s next single. It was nice to know that, like his fictional widower, he recognizes the good stuff, but the prepping was hardly necessary. The audience sang along (as it did on just about every song), and that helped Chesney get through the pure schmaltz with a semblance of sincerity and pull off the more classic-rock-styled sections without bumbling through the bombast.

No Shirt bumbles a fair amount, going soft like Jimmy Buffett in places, and histrionic like Journey in the guitar solo of "A Lot of Things Different." Yet the disc still does an admirable job of speaking to its target demographic while reaching out and growing up. At the Blossom Center, young women predominated in the 12,000-strong crowd, but not by much, and there were even groups of drinkin’ buddies the way you’d never see at an ’N Sync concert. No wonder No Shirt hogged the #1 spot on the Billboard country chart for weeks after its April release. (It’s now dropped to #2.) Behind it at #3 was Alan Jackson’s Drive (now at #4). And between them was the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (still hanging in at #3), which some critics complain isn’t getting the respect from country radio that traditionalism deserves. If they want to know why, all they need to do is look around.