If that is how people want to introduce me from here on out, as an LGBT activist who sings on the side, it doesn’t matter to me. I really meant it when I said that if it makes the path of a single 14-year-old easier, I’m in. So coming out and using my voice to, hopefully, facilitate dialogue and change was really important to me. It was something that I had to be OK with. “Part of my deal was that I was going to be a poster child for gay issues and that will probably eclipse my music for at least a little while, if not longer. Sitting down for lunch at a West Village cafe in NYC, Wright-who is.

Chely Wright is nervous and she has good reason to be. Chely Wright knew she was gay when she was a child. Both projects centered around her coming out process and the acceptance of herself. “In the very orchestrated way that I came out, it is something that I signed up for,” she says. As she releases her memoir and her first new album in five years. In 2010, Wright released the memoir, Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer, and the album, Lifted Off the Ground. If more people know Wright as a spokesperson for gay rights than they do for her music, she says she is alright with that. While recording the Christmas album, Wright recorded five new songs that will come out on the “Revival” EP in March.

In 2016, Wright released her first post-coming out album, the Joe Henry-produced “I Am the Rain.” She dropped a holiday EP called “Santa Will Find You!” last November. Chely Wright, Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer. I think we’re moving in the right direction.” But change happens whether they want it to or not. “Country music seems to be one of the last bastions of where people feel safe to be homophobic. “There is no way that we are not closer to change - progress just happens that way - but we’re a long way off from where we need to be,” she says.

Chely wright memoir