If Nick Lachey can't stop people talking about his failed marriage to Jessica Simpson, he'll join them. He talks to John Bailey about spilling the beans on his new record.

On television, Nick Lachey is a showman, a show-off, a music/reality TV celebrity. In person, Lachey comes across as unartfully modest, even shy. He's neither reticent nor inarticulate, and he cuts a formidably buff figure, but there's also the sense that he's still surprised by the attention he's received in the past few years. Surprised, and tired.

"For me, I think I've moved on. I think the media's slowly catching up to the point where they can move on as well. But, emotionally, I've moved on from that chapter of my life."

I've been asked not to bring up Lachey's recent divorce from Jessica Simpson, and to focus on his new album. But, since his fame has largely been due to the success of the reality TV series based on his marriage, The Newlyweds, and his new album is a heartfelt reflection on the relationship and its breakdown, it's like ignoring the elephant in the corner.

"You have to be smart and understand why everyone has that interest and why they want to talk about that. For me, that's fine, but I also want people to understand that it's bigger than that. I've got a record out, I'm doing other things. I don't want to be defined by one relationship, or one television show. I think I'm a much deeper person than that! And I have a lot more to say.

"So while I do understand the interest, at the same time, I'm ready for everyone to move on from that."

It's a relief that Lachey doesn't turn out to be so reluctant to discuss the issue. Opening up his private life to the public eye has meant that audiences the world over have seen Lachey and Simpson at their best and worst. Does he regret allowing the media such unfettered access to his life?

"It's not that I regret it, but there've probably been times where I think afterwards, 'I shoulda held something back there'. If there's one thing I've learned in the process of the last few years, it's that as far as your personal life goes, it's good to scale it back a bit, you know?

"I think going forward I've learned it's good to keep your private life a little more private. It's not as if there's a valve you can turn off once you've opened up those floodgates."

What gave The Newlyweds its car-crash fascination quotient was the way it allowed us access to the ordinariness of its Tinseltown subjects. Like Paris Hilton in The Simple Life and Ozzy Osborne's clan in The Osbornes, the show presented celebrities without airbrushing and a make-up team.

Simpson famously asked if tuna was a variety of chicken, and dirty laundry, literally, piled up in mounds in the foyer of the couple's LA mansion. Between studio takes and music-video recordings, they tried to figure out how to start the dishwasher.

The series provided the same interest that propels the regular "stars without make-up" editions of weekly gossip mags.

Simpson was shown to be loveably daffy and naive, while Lachey, originally famous as a member of neo-Motown boy band 98 degrees, came across as an often bewildered ordinary guy trying to reconcile the opportunities afforded by fame and fortune with the daily challenges of beginning a family. He never intended things to get so intimate.

"It's a little ironic considering the show, but I'm a very private person. With that show, there's a very common misconception that we knew what that thing was going to become. No one had any idea it was going to be that big. We agreed to do it as a six-episode promotional vehicle for our albums and it just kind of erupted from there."

Of course, the result of the show's success has meant that, when the marriage turned sour, the media demanded to know every detail. Tabloids were abuzz with rumours months before the split was announced.

The pressure of constant scrutiny while a major part of your life crumbles must be enormous. It's a surprise that he agrees to any publicity tours at all.

"While I don't want to ever become a recluse, I feel you have to live your life. If you allow the paparazzi to dictate your life, then you're not living. At the same time, I certainly don't welcome it. I try to avoid it all costs! But there's an inevitability to it."

It's even more surprising, then, that he chose to expose his feelings through the lyrics of his new album. Every one of its dozen tracks sounds like an undisguised address to his former wife, moving from questioning, to anger, to despair and, finally some kind of acceptance.

"We built it up to watch it fall/Like we meant nothing at all/I gave and gave the best of me/But couldn't give you what you need", he cries on I Can't Hate You Anymore. First single What's Left of Me sees him lament, "I've been dying inside/Little by little/Nowhere to go but goin' out of my mind". Finally, the closing track Resolution has him assuring us that he'll be OK: "It's my resolution/I'm letting go ... I just wanna be the best man I can be."

Lachey is proud of the way he uses his recordings to work through these feelings.

"For me, in order to make the album I felt like I needed to make, I had to be honest. And it's an honesty and a courageousness that I was unwilling to do before. For me to write songs, all I really know how to do is write from the heart and from personal experiences. In this case, I made this album during a very difficult time in my life.

"If I wrote the album today, it'd be a very different album. But we don't always get to control where our life goes. If I can say nothing else about the record, it's that it is honest."

If he'd written it today, what would that album have been?

"I don't know. But I wouldn't be at the same point I was then. I had a lot of things I had to get off my chest and out of my system and that's what it ended up being."