One of Country Music’s biggest stars of the past two decades, Tim McGraw, enters into a new phase of his recording career with the release of his new album Two Lanes Of Freedom. It’s his first album for Big Machine after a two-decade run with Curb Records. Many critics are calling it his best work – which is saying a lot, given his long line of successful albums such as Live Like You Were Dying and Southern Voice.

In addition to his success in music, Tim has carved out quite a successful movie career, including playing Memphis resident Sean Tuohy in the Warner Brothers' Oscar-winning film The Blind Side. Is there anything coming down that career avenue for Tim? “Nothing right now,” he says. "I’m reading scripts, and I’ve read a few that may come back around, but it’s all about timing for me. It’s finding time to do it,” he says, with the album release and a summer tour figuring heavily in his plans. “That being said, if I found something that I had to do , then I would do it, but so far, I haven’t found that yet.”

Which movie did he enjoy the most? “I’ve enjoyed every one of them, learned from each, and got to work with some great actors, but Friday Night Lights is one of my favorite roles. That character was such a dark character, but [had] so many layers to it, and it was my first big role. Bad guys are always fun to play,” he said with a smile.

McGraw said that acting is similar to recording in a lot of ways. “You try to create a scenairo where you are the character walking through the song, and translate that to where the listener can feel the same thing. That’s what you do as an artist – you try to project life or someone else’s life into what you’re doing. You want them to make that conenction as well. That’s why great characters in songs or movies are so layered, that somewhere in the character you can find yourself, and if you can find that in something you are listening to or watching, you can go along for the ride. I think that’s what every sort of art is intended to do.”

With 2013 marking two decades since his first album, is there anything he would do differently if he had a chance? “There’s a long list, but I guess it’s a practice in futility because any different step you make along the way would change where you’re at. Certainly, under a microscope, I might say ‘I would change that and that and that,’ but once you pull out from that and you look at it as a whole, the picture begins to change. And, I don’t know if I would do that,” he says honestly.

Two Lanes Of Freedom is in stores this coming Tuesday, February 5, 2013. Look for McGraw on the road staring in May, along with opening acts Brantley Gilbert and Love & Theft.