Aldean's wife Brittany also makes her studio debut on the album with the emotional power ballad "Easier Gone."
Jason Aldean has always called himself a "pretty private guy."
"I don't go out and air out my laundry on social media or whatever," Aldean tells PEOPLE. "If I go through things, I kind of internalize it and deal with it and compartmentalize things and move on."
But as the Grammy-nominated entertainer, 49, has gotten older, music has found a way of revealing him like never before. "I've had to experience different things just in family and life," he says. "Sometimes it's therapeutic just to write things that you feel like you want to say."
And that sort of therapy became the backbone of his new album Songs About Us, but most specifically in the touching track the touching track "Help You Remember."
"My uncle, my mom's brother, had passed away of Lewy body dementia (LBD)," says Aldean of the second-most common form of dementia after Alzheimer's disease. "I watched my cousin, who was his only child, deal with that and I did what I could to help get him through that."
Soon after, Aldean got the news that his wife Brittany's father Donald Kerr had also been diagnosed with the cruel degenerative disease. "That was really tough," he says quietly about his father-in-law. "Watching my family and my wife's family go through these kinds of things -- I mean, it's heartbreaking. It's tough to watch."
Faced with feelings Aldean admits he wasn't entirely sure what to do with, he gave longtime friend and bass player Tully Kennedy a call - and the two began work on "Help You Remember."
"He and I sat there that night and just worked up the idea of what we thought it should be," says Aldean of the song he and Kennedy ultimately wrote alongside Kurt Allison, John Morgan and Lydia Vaughan. "We were trying to figure out how do we write this more like a 'Live Like You Were Dying' than just this really sad song."
As soon as the song was finished, they knew they had something special.
"I think it's something that a lot of people are going to be able to relate to," Aldean says of "Help You Remember." "The more we were playing it for people dealing with dementia or Alzheimer's disease, the more you could just tell it was connecting. They don't expect that from us on an album. So, to have something like that to kind of turn it on its head a little bit was a good thing."
Nevertheless, bringing the song to wife Brittany was far more emotional than Aldean ever expected. "We wrote it and demo'd it and that's when I told her I had something to play for her," he remembers. "She started crying and then we played it for my mom and got the same response from her. I really wrote it for my mom and for my wife and for my family - and I mean, it was therapeutic for me too."
The song has also helped Aldean put a spotlight on the Alzheimer's Foundation of America and the resources they offer for caregivers and those currently struggling with the disease.
"Unfortunately, it takes you going through something personally and it really affecting you to wake you up and go, 'Man, I didn't realize this many people deal with this,'" says Aldean. "It did open my eyes up to that and want to get behind it and bring awareness to it."
And while the song is now out in the world, the challenging world that Aldean and his family still find themselves navigating remains.
"Brittany FaceTimes her dad two or three times a day and talks to him," says Aldean of his father-in-law. "You do everything you can for them to make them comfortable and just try and postpone the inevitable. There's not really much to do other than just try and spend as much time with them as possible and just love on them. That's kind of where Brittany’s head is at right now."
Brittany and her impressive voice are also featured on the power ballad "Easier Gone" off of Songs About Us.
"It was always about finding the right song and finding something that I felt like she would sound great on," the "Try That In A Small Town" singer says. "This song probably was a little bit of a change up from what people were expecting. But I thought she did amazing. I mean, she'd never been in the studio, so getting her in the studio and getting her feet wet with that was important. At the end of the day, I feel like she knocked it out of the park."
And while Aldean admits that he has often thought that couples doing duets can get "cheesy," this one was far from it. "That's the thing I've learned about life," says Aldean, who recently scored his 31st No. 1 single courtesy of "How Far Does a Goodbye Go." "You can plan for whatever you want, but planning sometimes goes out the window and it is what it is."
Take, for example, Aldean becoming a father at 25 years old.
"Now I've got one, Keeley, that graduated from college already, one [Kendyl] that's about to graduate high school next month and go to college and then I got two little ones [8-year-old Memphis and 7-year-old Navy] that are just starting, you know?" he says. "It definitely keeps you on your toes and makes you appreciate all you have."