Chely Wright Informations

Richell Rene "Chely" Wright[a] (/ˈʃɛli ˈraɪt/; born October 25, 1970) is an American country music singer and activist. On the strength of her debut album in 1994, the Academy of Country Music (ACM) named her Top New Female Vocalist in 1995. Wright's first Top 40 country hit came in 1997 with "Shut Up and Drive". Two years later, her fourth album yielded a number one single, the title track, "Single White Female". Overall, Wright has released seven studio albums on various labels, and has charted more than fifteen singles on the country charts. As of May 2010, Wright's previous eight albums and 19 singles released had sold over 1,500,000 copies and 10,000,000 digital impressions to date in the United States. In May 2010, Wright became one of the first major country music performers to publicly come out as lesbian. In television appearances and an autobiography, she cited among her reasons for publicizing her homosexuality a concern with bullying and hate crimes toward gays, particularly gay teenagers, and the damage to her life caused by "lying and hiding".

She has written songs that have been recorded by Brad Paisley, Richard Marx, Indigo Girls, Mindy Smith and Clay Walker, among them Walker's top ten hit, "I Can't Sleep" that won her a BMI award. On May 4, 2010, Wright simultaneously released her memoir, the LAMDA nominated Like Me, and her first album of new songs since 2005, Lifted Off the Ground.

Wright's eighth album, I Am the Rain, was released on September 9, 2016, by MRI/Sony and was produced by Joe Henry. It entered the Billboard country chart at 13, the second highest debut of her career. It was also her first appearance on the Americana album chart, where it reached number 9.

Wright released her first Christmas EP in 2018 titled "Santa Will Find You." She released an EP titled Revival in May 2019.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Wright grew up in a musical family in Wellsville, Kansas, a town with a population of less than 2,000. According to her autobiography, Like Me, she wanted to be a country music performer since the age of four, and realized at age eight that she was gay.

As a young child, Wright took piano lessons, and began professional singing appearances by age 11, including playing "Taps" on bugle at the funerals of veterans at the local American Legion.

A Christian, Wright harbored the belief that her sexual orientation was immoral, that her secret would kill her career hopes. From early childhood, she resolved to never confide her orientation to anyone or to pursue romantic relationships with women.

The summer before her senior year of high school, she worked as a performing musician at the Ozark Jubilee, a long-running country music show in Branson, Missouri. In 1989, immediately after high school, she landed a position in a musical production at Opryland USA, a now-defunct theme park in Nashville, Tennessee. She lived permanently in Nashville until 2008. In 1993, Harold Shedd signed her to Mercury/Polygram, and her first album was released in 1994 on the Polydor label.

After releasing two unsuccessful albums through Mercury/Polygram, Wright asked to be released from her contract and signed with MCA Nashville. There, she had her first top twenty country hit in 1997 with the song "Shut Up and Drive," off her third album, Let Me In. In 1999, her fourth album, Single White Female, produced several hit songs and her first gold album certification. In 2000, while touring with singer Brad Paisley, Wright and Paisley cowrote the duet "Hard to Be a Husband, Hard to Be a Wife", which they performed in their joint shows and at the Grand Ole Opry's 75th anniversary, televised by CBS. The Opry performance was later nominated for Vocal Event of the Year at the 35th Annual CMA Awards. Wright also joined Diamond Rio for a song on their One More Day album, as well as Paisley's Part II album, both released in 2001.

Wright's fifth studio album, Never Love You Enough, was originally scheduled to be released on September 11, 2001 but due to the World Trade Center attack, the release date was postponed to September 25. Never Love You Enough debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard Country Albums chart. In these peak years of her popularity, Wright was named to People Magazine's annual "50 Most Beautiful People" list in 2001 and ranked No. 93 among FHM's "100 Sexiest Women of 2002". and later that year was ranked No. 18 of "The 20 Hottest Women in Music 2002"

She also cowrote Clay Walker's 2003 top 10 single "I Can't Sleep".

In 2003, Wright parted ways with MCA Nashville after "Never Love You Enough" failed to meet sales expectations. In January 2004, she signed with a new independent label, Vivaton, and began preparation for a new album. Although a music video was released for a song entitled "The Back of the Bottom Drawer," the album never materialized. Wright split with Vivaton in June 2004. She wrote and released a single, "The Bumper of My SUV" in late 2004, mostly through the Internet and various radio stations, in response to an altercation with an irate woman who noticed the United States Marine Corps bumper sticker on the back of Wright's car.

The success of "The Bumper of My SUV", released on Wright's own Painted Red Music Group, was followed by the release of an EP, Everything. The record was made exclusively available through Wright's website, but its success led to a deal with Dualtone Records.

Wright's sixth album, The Metropolitan Hotel, was released in February 2005 on Dualtone. The album debuted at No. 18 on Billboard's Top Country chart and reached No. 7 on the Top Independent Albums chart. Wright signed to Vanguard Records in 2008. She released her seventh studio album, Lifted Off the Ground, on May 4, 2010, produced by Grammy Award winner Rodney Crowell. In October 2014 Wright's Kickstarter campaign to fund her eighth studio album became the sixth most successful Kickstarter music campaign and the number one campaign in country music. It raised $250,000, which will allow Wright to record and promote the album and to produce a music video to be released in 2015.

In July 2016, Wright announced the release of her eighth studio album, I Am the Rain. The album, which has roots in Americana, was produced by Joe Henry. It features collaborations with Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell and The Milk Carton Kids and the album has drawn comparisons to Carole King's Tapestry. The album was released on September 9, 2016 through the Painted Red Music Group and RED Distribution. A U.S. tour is planned for 2017.

A new EP, titled Revival will be released on May 10, 2019. Wright previewed the first track, "Say the Word", featuring the EP's producer Jeremy Lister, through Rolling Stone Country on April 23. On August 10, Wright made her return to the Grand Ole Opry stage.

Despite her resolution against having sex with women, Wright disclosed in her memoir that, by her early thirties, she had had sexual relationships with two women. She had her first same-sex experience at age 19 — "it was the first time I'd ever had a girl's body pressed against mine"—and the affair lasted the better part of a year. From 1993 to about 2004, Wright maintained a committed relationship with a woman she described as "the love of my life", a woman she met shortly after winning her first recording contract. The era of their relationship overlaps Wright's rise to chart-topping stardom. They maintained their relationship even though her partner subsequently married a man, and even while both women briefly had heterosexual relationships. During their final five years they lived together, the relationship suffered numerous breakups and reconciliations due to the strain of being closeted, the fact that "neither one of us thought it was acceptable to be in a gay relationship", and Wright's prolonged absences while performing on tour nationally and internationally.

In the last months of 2000, Wright began a relationship with country singer Brad Paisley. Even though Wright and her female lover had moved in together earlier that year, and Wright admitted she felt no sexual attraction to Paisley, she recounted that "he's wickedly smart, which is one of the reasons why I made the decision to spend time with him. I loved Brad. I never had the capacity to fall in love with him, but I figured if I’m gonna live a less than satisfied life, this is the guy I could live my life with. If I’m gonna be with a boy, this is the boy." She held him in high esteem and great affection in every way other than sexual attraction. In her autobiography she expressed remorse for how she treated him, and told Oprah Winfrey that "I have a lot of regret for how that [relationship] began and had a middle and ended. I had no business being in a relationship with him".

Wright eventually abandoned the belief that being lesbian is immoral and deviant:

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