David Nail had an unusual week. He spent it at at home in Nashville.

“This is the first seven days straight I’m home this year,” he said by phone, before hopping a bus to open for Alan Jackson at Cruzan Amphitheatre today. “People kind of forget you. When I first started traveling, I’d get emails from friends about meeting for lunch, and slowly but surely after saying no all the time, I stopped getting the emails. I (was) extremely ready for some time off to play husband and son again, and to have conversations in person instead of on the phone.”

But that’s the price of a successful country music career. He calls 2012 “a wild and amazing year and one I will never forget. I grew up very modest, never really traveled, so where I’m at in my career allows me opportunities that seem foreign to me: having 2,000 strangers call you by name. I’m ready for 2013 but I’m sad to see 2012 go because it’s been such a great year.”

This year, Nail saw the release of his second album, “The Sound of A Million Dreams,” do something the first album couldn’t: It earned him his first No. 1 single. But it wasn’t easy. It took the cheating song “Let It Rain” 48 weeks to claw to the top.

“I like to look at it as 48 weeks and no one got tired of it,” Nail laughs.

The second single — the title cut — was a Scooter Caruso, Phil Vassar-penned, piano-driven ballad about the power of a song. “The Sound of A Million Dreams” barely blipped on the charts, because Nail was his own competition.

“We got in a bit of a pickle,” he said. “We had released a video of an Adele song online, a cover of ‘Someone Like You.’ Out of nowhere, people were taking the song off the Internet and playing it on radio. I knew that it was not good for ‘The Sound of A Million Dreams.’ But any time someone wants to play a song you’re singing on the radio, how do you tell them no?”

You don’t. And there was another wrinkle. Nail didn’t want to seem like an opportunist, riding up the charts on Adele’s coattails.

“I was scared to death. I didn’t want anyone thinking who in the world is this redneck singing Adele? I didn’t want to milk this song that I know is a proven hit and further my career based on that. I didn’t want it to appear like we recorded this song because we knew it was a hit.”

Making a personal connection with fans is Nail’s primary goal. He’s been called a singer’s singer, naturally gifted, but disciplined in his approach. But singing, he says, you can’t really teach that.

“I think there are certain things you can teach a singer like how to use your diaphragm, but my philosophy is, you close your eyes, you think about the words you’re singing and you let the God-given ability take over from there. I used to get a lot of grief when I first started about closing my eyes when I sing. But it’s really that I’m closing my mind, I’m lost in that moment, the lyrics and the melody.

“I’ve always said if you walk out of my show and you’re consumed with how much time I spent on the left side of the stage, or how much I was jumping around, or that you didn’t like the shirt I was wearing, I didn’t do my job which is to move you with the music. I want you to walk out and have to try to remember what I did on stage or what I wore because I want you to be lost in the music too. That was one of the first things I picked up from other artists: Go up there and treat every experience like a new one.”