Last October, Zac Brown and his wife, Shelly, announced their plans to separate after 12 years of marriage and five children together. The decision still weighs heavily on the Zac Brown Band frontman.

"You know, lots of things that you don't ever foresee," Brown admits when asked by CBS This Morning when he knew his marriage wasn't going to last. "But you know, when you live in something long enough that it's not working anymore, and that the differences that are there are greater, and that it's healthier to not live in conflict than it is to try to stay. And no matter how many mistakes, or whatever, and she absolutely was the one. And, you know, we have five amazing, beautiful children together. And that was the reason that we were together.”

"It's not how I planned it to be," Brown adds, "But it gave me more than I could've ever dreamed of having, you know?"

While he refrained from going into much detail about the reasons behind the breakup, he did seem to hint that he has been going through his share of issues as of late.

"I decided two years ago that there were just parts of myself that I didn't wanna be anymore,” says Brown, who recently released a new album, The Owl, with his ZBB bandmates. “Some mornings being on the road you wake up with some headaches. That's not anymore. My life's not about that anymore."

He insists things have changed for him on a personal level: "I think it's important to be vulnerable, and be yourself, and just be real."

"I don't want to be around things that aren't real anymore. I'm trying to engineer my life for things that have soul, and things that I create," Brown says. "Some of 'em are fun. And then some of the things are like me bleeding my soul, and my life, and my hardship out in a song."

The ZBB superstar recently released a solo album, Controversy, that has been stirring up exactly that.

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