Fifteen years ago, Chely Wright became the first mainstream country singer to come out as gay — and she’s never stopped fighting to make other people feel seen. Now, with a brand-new corporate career, she’s putting her music experience to use in the boardroom so that no one else ever has to feel like they don’t fit in at work.
“I’m ground zero of what it looks like and feels like to not feel like you belong at work,” Wright, 54, recalled in an exclusive interview with Us Weekly. “I know what that feels like, and it’s not a great feeling. And it’s unsurvivable, I will tell you. You think you can do it. When you’re 20, you think, ‘I can do this, I can manage this, I can keep this secret.’ And then you get a few years under your belt and live life and fall in love with someone that the world doesn’t want you to fall in love with. You pretty quickly realize that, ‘I’m not going to survive the closet.’ And that’s what happened to me.”
Wright famously came out as a lesbian in 2010 after nearly two decades in country music. It might not seem like a big deal now, but at the time, no major Nashville stars were public members of the LGBTQIA+ community. (While k.d. lang came out in 1992, she stopped making strictly “country” music after her first album.) As Wright wrote in her 2010 memoir, Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer, hiding her sexuality nearly drove her to suicide, and she encountered pushback from colleagues she’d considered friends.
The landscape has changed a lot since then — artists like Brandi Carlile, Ty Herndon and T.J. Osborne are all out and proud — but Wright, who’s sold more than 1.5 million records, knows that the fight for acceptance is far from over.
“People talk a lot about, ‘Oh, just come out, it’s safe to come out in country music. … People don’t care anymore,’” she told Us. “I push back on that, because if you’ve dreamed your whole life of becoming a country music singer, making records, playing the Grand Ole Opry, getting a record deal, hearing yourself on the radio, touring with the other artists in country music — I think a lot of care and thought has to go into how you feel, how safe you feel, what your psychological safety is at work.”
It’s the “at work” part that Wright is focusing her energy on these days. Since the coronavirus pandemic upended the livelihoods of touring musicians everywhere, the “Single White Female” artist left the music industry behind, pivoting to the corporate world, accepting a role as chief diversity officer at workplace design firm Unispace in 2021. (Her last album, I Am the Rain, dropped in 2016.) Earlier this year, she was hired as the senior vice president of corporate social responsibility and new market growth at the global workplace experience and facilities management company ISS.
In her new role, she’ll be working to establish client and community partnerships that can make a difference both globally and locally. First up, she’s helping to host an event that will raise funds for the Pasadena and Altadena communities affected by January’s wildfires and aid food suppliers who were hardest hit. It’s a lot, but for Wright, it all comes back to that simple feeling of belonging.
“I know firsthand what it feels like to be afraid that you don’t fit in at work,” she told Us. “Being a country music artist was not my hobby. It was my job. That’s how I paid my bills. That’s how I ate, that’s how I paid my rent and paid my mortgage.”
Her own coming-out experience is what led her to the corporate world, as she’d been sharing her story at various speaking engagements since going public with her sexuality in 2010. When her touring income dried up during lockdown, she made her side hustle her main gig, which eventually led her to Unispace and now ISS. And while it might initially seem difficult to draw the line between the music industry and corporate social responsibility, Wright is quick to note that you can’t succeed on Music Row without at least a little business acumen.
“When I got to Nashville, I realized, ‘Uh-oh, all the other 7,000 people that moved to Nashville in 1989 who wanted to get a record contract are as good if not better than me,” she recalled. “I very quickly understood, ‘Alright, my differentiator is going to be that I’m going to outwork them and outthink them.’”
In the early days, that meant everything from booking her own shows to dealing with merch vendors and talking to the tour bus company.
“I just really enjoyed business,” Wright explained. “I’ve always enjoyed figuring things out and finding a way to get a win, whether it be for my paper route customers [as a kid] or my country music fans, or the people I’ve been able to work with in design build and now facilities management. There’s a win for everyone. And good business is making sure that your client is glad they spent their money with you. They do it again, and they’d tell their friends. That’s it. That’s what country music has in common with facilities management.”
While Wright is thrilled to be starting her new gig at ISS (which has 320,000 employees worldwide), she hasn’t fully closed the book on her country career. She calls herself “a songwriter at heart” who keeps tons of voice notes for songs on her phone, and she’s currently working on a Broadway musical version of her memoir with the legendary Jean Smart. She’s also more than happy to discuss the state of country music today — and the way some things still haven’t changed for women in the industry.
When discussing the fact that country radio still prioritizes male artists over the numerous female singers making waves today, Wright remembered an incident from her own career after her song “Single White Female” hit No. 1 in 1999. She’d gone to a radio station to promote the single with an in-studio interview, but the whole time she was there, the DJ never played her song. When she asked the program director about it, he told her they couldn’t play it because they’d already played a Reba McEntire track in the previous hour.
“My other peers that are women, they were facing the same thing,” Wright recalled. “Think about how detrimental that was to women [artists] in that it disallowed us from building community. It disallowed us from being backstage, grabbing a guitar and writing a song when we weren’t on stage the way that the men were able to. It disallowed us to get to know one another and think about, ‘Let’s put a tour together next year.’ I don’t wanna say it pitted us against one another, but it reminded all of us that there’s one spot for a woman.”
It’s those experiences that have taught Wright the importance of community, and it’s what she’s bringing with her in her new chapter.
“That’s why equity matters,” she declared. “That’s why it’s important that women and Black and brown people and socially economically disadvantaged people and veterans have to be invited to the table for opportunity. Because if they’re not at the table, they’re going to have to go do a bunch of other things to get caught up with the pack, and it costs them more. It disallows them from growing the relationships that others get to grow just by showing up.”
