Blake Shelton didn’t want to beat around the bush with his 12th studio album If I’m Honest. To Shelton, giving fans an honest reflection of his life over the last year was the best policy.

“I think it would be ridiculous for me to just throw out an album that doesn’t speak to my life,” Shelton tells CMT's Katie Cook on the new Hot 20 Countdown. “I think it would be complete fantasy land for me to make a record that doesn’t speak to that.”

Shelton added had he made a different album, he wouldn’t be earning his paycheck. “I just don’t see any other way for me to do my job as a country artist than to do that and to be honest about it,” Shelton says. “That’s where, I think, the best music comes from, is from an honest place in your heart.”

Shelton also admitted that during the making of the record, he questioned whether he was oversharing “every day.”

“Then it was like ‘You know what, I don’t care,’” Shelton said, “because I’m not making this record for the label. I’m not even making this record for the fans. I’m making this record for me, and hopefully they’re all into it at the end of the day, but I gotta do this for me. I gotta get it out of myself.”

For those who are wondering about the identity of Wyatt Earp listed as a co-writer on the breakup song “She’s Got a Way With Words” with Marc Beeson and Andy Albert, it’s definitely not Shelton’s pseudonym. According to Shelton’s record label, Earp is a songwriter in his late 50s who is directly related to the famous lawman of the same name from the American Old West.

Shelton joins Cook for the entire episode of Hot 20, airing tomorrow (May 21) at 9 a.m. ET and Sunday (May 22). If I’m Honest is out now.