We recently caught up with out country music singer Chely Wright to talk about her collaboration with acclaimed producer and musician Linda Perry, why Stephanie Miller nominated her to be her “coming out coach,” and how many toes she would give up to work with Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls. AfterEllen.com: Since we’re here to talk about the Linda Perry collaboration, I’ll begin with the obvious: Do you remember where you were the first time you heard the 4 Non-Blondes’ song “What’s Up”? Chely Wright: I do and it just now came back to my consciousness. My brother, Chris, still lived in our house after he graduated from high school because he was doing concrete work with my dad. He had a concrete work truck and this shoebox full of cassette tapes. He was driving me somewhere and said, “Check this out!” and pulled out a tape. Chris liked AC/DC, Bad Company, Kiss, he liked rock and roll, and he put in the 4 Non-Blondes’ song “What’s Up.”
I was so into Randy Travis and The Judds, really straight ahead country. I remember I was ambivalent about the song, but I was more taken with my brother’s obsession. I didn’t know if it was a guy or a girl singing. I said, “What’s the name of this band?” and he said, “4 Non-Blondes. It’s a bunch of chicks. Aren’t they awesome?” He was just obsessed with them.
Recently I was talking to my brother and [told him I was in LA writing]. He said, “I thought you didn’t co-write anymore?” I said, “Well, I’m co-writing with someone that you don’t pass up the chance to write with: Linda Perry.” He said, “Holy crap! Linda Perry?” He about lost his mind and I remembered, oh my God, he liked her. When I told [Linda] that, she just laughed and said, “Oh, yeah, those jarheads love me.”
AE: How did you and Linda Perry begin working together? CW: I have my good friend Diana Rodriguez, formerly of GLAAD, to thank for positioning us. She laughs now and says, “I put you guys at the same table on purpose.” I participated in the San Francisco GLAAD awards, as did Linda and Clementine Ford. I was scheduled to sing at the event and Clementine was there to give Cybill Shepherd, her mom, an award, along with another daughter of Cybill’s, who’s gay as well. We walked into the red carpet and Clementine turned to me and grabbed my shoulder and said, “I’m so happy for you. I’m so proud of you.” Then Linda Perry walked by and [Clementine] said, “Do you know Linda?” and I said, “Oh s–t, you’re Linda Perry!” CW: I didn’t know they were dating because I’m just super duper not up on anything. I’m so behind I didn’t even know that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman had broken up. [Laughs] I just don’t get these things. Linda sat at the table and we didn’t visit much because Cybill was sitting between us and Cybill and I hit it off. I mean, we had a great time. She was wonderful. So Cybill and I we were just having this good talk and I was thinking back to when I was a kid and-do you know that show Moonlighting?
AE: Sure. CW: I loved that show. I know I was supposed to love that show because of Bruce Willis but I loved it because of Cybill Shepherd. I would become fixated on it on Tuesday nights and I know that my family thought that I had a crush on Bruce Willis, but I really thought Cybill Shepherd was smoking hot.
AE: When I first came out to my mom she said, “But when you were young you were so obsessed with Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing,” and I had to explain to her that it was really Jennifer Grey that had my heart. CW: Isn’t that great.
AE: OK, so you’re talking to Cybill and-? CW: So we have this good talk. Clementine is next to her mom and leaning over to contribute a little bit, but Linda was pretty quiet. She was making eye contact and smiling and friendly, but she was atypical of rock stars that I had been around. Typically, a rock star commands the table and is tossing back drinks. I don’t mean to perpetuate stereotypes, but they kind of exist for a reason. But she was knocking down stereotypes left and right that night and I thought that was interesting and cool.
I got up to play and sing and I got back to the table and Linda leaned over and said, “You need to come out to LA. Let’s write a song.” I said, “Pardon?” She said, “Come out to LA. I have a great studio. Come out and we’ll write a song.” I said, “Don’t tease me like that. That’s not very nice to do.” And she said, “I’m not.”
Clementine looked at me and said, “She doesn’t do that. She’s not teasing. She really liked your performance.” Linda had a quick talk with me about the song. She said, “Of course I know who you are, I’ve been watching the press lately and heard some stuff. I think I know a bit about your past records. Let’s do something.” She grabbed her nametag off the table, wrote down her number, handed it to me and said, “Call me.”
AE: Linda Perry is not necessarily known for working with country music singers. Was that something that you two discussed? Was it a concern or an interesting challenge? CW: We looked at it as an opportunity. It wasn’t a concern. It was the opposite. Music is the universal language. The first day that we wrote, we didn’t even write. We sat in the control room of the recording studio and we talked. I was so relieved that she wanted to do that. CW: How do I explain co-writing? It can be the most awkward, horrific experience ever. One can leave the experience feeling like they need a shower. Or it can be like making your new best friend. It runs the gamut. That’s why I quit co-writing. I stopped co-writing back in late 2004, except for the co-writes that I did with people where that just cosmically happened. But I stopped because sometimes when you sit down, [the other writer] wants to write the song because they want a song on your record and they say, “That’s good? That’s good, right? OK, go cut that.” But these records are going to stay around forever and it’s got to be right.
[Linda and I] talked about music and we talked about the shared wealth of the process and how we get there and our challenges because all of it plays into it. When you’re sitting down to write something, you reach behind you and you pull out a lot of tools. And every day of your life, you put something back there. You can’t really do the collaborative thing with somebody without a basic understanding of who they are.We hit it off on that first day talking. We weren’t even sure we would do that second day of writing. It hinged upon whether we liked one another and we did. But Linda loves country and she’s even recorded [a couple of songs with Faith Hill]. I’m not certain for which album-
AE: I think she co-wrote a song for Cry. CW: She didn’t say, but she told me about the experience and who knows why those [other] songs never saw the light of day. I have a high suspicion that it had nothing to do with Faith or Linda.
Linda Perry is a formidable force. She is a woman. She is a gay woman. And she is apologetic about none of the above. I have a feeling the tracks were brilliant. Faith is an immense vocalist. You listen to early Faith records and you listen to her now. She’s grown. She’s always been good, but she’s really good now. She wanted to grow and expand and Nashville didn’t want to let her. I think she could have made a huge, huge record with Linda Perry. But there you go. I just don’t think the country music industry was all that comfortable with that particular collaboration.
Linda and I did talk about her love of country music, but I’m really not considered a commercial country artist, entirely. I’m a little bit folk, alternative now. But I guess I’m always going to be a country singer. I mean, you can’t get that out of my voice. AE: You were obviously in a very different place when you wrote the songs for your newly released album Lifted Off the Ground. Has your changed perspective affected the way that you write songs? CW: It has. On the last day that Linda and I wrote we had our best, perhaps most profound conversation and it was about this. When I wrote those songs [for Lifted Off the Ground] I didn’t know I was coming out and so I didn’t see freedom. I lived in a hole. I was in a spiritual, physical, emotional hole. Yet it was the most prolific time for me, as a writer having the luxury of a suspended intellect. You look at the great artists of any medium-poets and sculptors and painters-they’re all crazy. You do your best work when you’re compelled to cut your ear off. I had the benefit, dare I say, of being a little bit out of my mind when I wrote those songs.
Linda and I sat in the kitchen of her studio and she was sharing with me a new chapter in her writing. She’s incredibly health conscious. She does yoga. She’s very centered at this point in her life. We were having a dialogue about how to stay in that space without having to be miserable. I don’t want to go there again to get those songs. I can’t do it. I can’t survive that pilgrimage again.
The thing about Linda-I mean, there are so many things about Linda-but she just put her fist on her heart and said, “We’ve got to just stay in here.” That may sound trite and it may sound like anyone can say that, but you have two songwriters who’ve really kind of been through it. Linda said, “You have to get this out of it”-and she pointed to her head-“And you’ve got to stay here”-and she pointed to her heart. It’s so easily said, but so terrible difficult to apply. There, in turn, we think we wrote two good songs.
AE: That was my next question: how many songs did you work on together? CW: The best thing we did was bonded and the by-product of that was two songs. At the end of the trip, she said, “Come back out and we’ll record these.” So we’re actually going to record them. That does not always happen. We could have easily written songs and she could have said, “I enjoyed it and good luck to you.”
AE: Any surprising moments about the collaboration? CW: It was cool because she grabbed a ukulele and was needling around on it and I grabbed a guitar and we were playing and I said, “I like the tone of that,” and she hit a little note and I said, “That was so very Glen Campbell of you.” She wasn’t really that familiar. I said, “Play that little rift under that, that’s cool, it’s like a signature line,” and we ended up writing something that felt really folksy bluegrass. She was just beaming from ear to ear and she said, “I’ve never played anything like that. Nothing has ever come out of me like that.”
That’s the best you can hope for when two writers sit down: that the essence of both writers is interwoven. And that’s what we’ve got.
AE: It also sounds like it was nice to work with someone who respects the intimacy of songwriting, someone as invested in the process as much as the product. CW: [Rushing the process] is not just indigenous to Nashville and you can find writers there who just hate that way of doing things, too. But for a while there was a machine shop of songwriting on Music Row that was so banal and sterile. But I’ve gone to other cities to write with other writers and they’ve somehow adopted the same [mentality of], “Write two songs, you’re gonna cut them right?” It’s gross. I feel like, “I hope you left me a twenty on the dresser.” It made me feel like a whore. Sometimes I think that writers like that forget that these records are a part of us forever. It may be another cut to them but we go out and have fans for the rest of our lives come up with that record and ask us to sign it and ask what a song means. It’s like adopting a child. It’s a significant part of a person’s being.
AE: Do you have any idea when you’ll record the songs you wrote with Perry and when they might come out? CW: I’ll bet I’ll go out there within the next couple of months. My fall is getting busy, but I don’t want too much time to go by and I think Linda is eager to do it, too. I just enjoyed her. There are a lot of gifted people in our industry. You work with a lot of talented people and you think, “Why didn’t they make it?” I know so many people more talented than I am and you look at them and think, “They just didn’t make it. They just didn’t get a shot.” But the older I get the more I can dissect it and look and see some of the reasons why.
Linda Perry has this level of talent and she handed that level of talent off to an incredible work ethic. She works so hard with what she’s been giving. She’s been given much, she’s been given immense, incredible talent, but she works so hard and she has incredible courage in her craft. To sit down with somebody and to write a song the way that you would write it alone, I’ve never met another writer who would do that.
I’ll expound upon that: when I sit with my guitar-like, I’m holding a guitar right now as I talk to you-I sit in my house with a guitar most of the time, in front of the computer or emailing, and I’ll play and I’ll sing [sings a line] and I’ll just make up words and just throw lines out that don’t mean anything. Now when a person sits down for a co-write, they withdraw a little bit and you wouldn’t say those stupid lines that just come out because you don’t want to be embarrassed about, “Oh gosh, that didn’t rhyme” or “Why did I just say ‘sponge’? Why did that word just come out of my mouth?”
Linda does that and insists on that as the process with a co-writer. She says, “This is what I do.” You’re in the A room and you sit down and these guys swarm on you and mic you up and mic your guitars and they record the entire writing session. It’s free form, free flowing. They record everything. It takes so much courage to do that. To let just whatever falls out of your mouth, fall out of your mouth. She’s not afraid of anyone going, “That was a stupid line,” and I was floored with her courage.
And I get it. I get why Linda Perry is one of the most successful writers and producers out there. She has a level of talent and then she works her butt off with it.
AE: She also sounds like a generous spirit. You have to be generous to open yourself up like that. CW: Yes, she doesn’t play games. She didn’t give me the feeling of “I’m Linda Perry, who are you? What have you done?” She did her homework. She knew who I was. I mean, if you’re ever going to get nervous, I guess that would be the person to get nervous with. Songwriters or creative people, we’re all a little insecure, it’s what fuels us to write the next song. But I wanted to have a good day. I wanted to have a good day because I wanted Linda Perry to think that I was worth spending the day with. But she certainly didn’t baby me. She knew that I wrote my whole record myself. She knows I know how to write a song. She didn’t throw me a bone, but she didn’t bully me either. I’ve been bullied by writers and that’s not fun. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to walk out of a writing session. But she couldn’t have been more gracious.
AE: Any chance she’d join you on tour for a song or two? CW: She’s got a band, Deep Dark Robot, and a great new record that she’s putting out. Wait until you hear this stuff. It is so cool and good. I was asking her when she was going to tour and she was telling me some timelines and I had it in my head that [they] might coincide with some dates that I’m doing.
AE: What a show. CW: It would thrill me. I don’t know if she would do it, but it would absolutely thrill me. I think we would have a great, great time on stage. I think we’d have a lot of fun. She’s really funny. She’s a spiritual person, a deep person, but she’s wickedly funny and dry. She’s got a stealth humor and it shocked me. It was a real pleasant surprise.
AE: I like that in your Twitter exchanges she tells you to play it cool, but you can’t help but gush over her. CW: I said to her [over Twitter] the other day, “I’m buying you a present,” and she texted me back and I said, “If I’m twittering you, don’t text me” because she was mad a couple of weeks ago when she was twittering me and I answered her on text. She said, “Answer me on Twitter. It looks like you’re ignoring me.” Then she did it back to me so I said, “Forget it, I’m not buying you a present.” When she [apologized] and said, “I want my gift,” I wrote back, “Forget about you, you ruined the magic. AE: Have you figured out what to get her for an actual gift? CW: No, but I know it’s going to have meaning. I don’t know what it will be yet, but it has something to do with-we had a really great conversation the last day in the studio and it’s going to have something to do with that.
AE: Do you have any other musical partnerships in the works? CW: I want one with Emily Saliers. Can I will it into being? I want to write with Emily so bad. I’m a huge fan. I’m a new fan, but, oh my gosh, I realize that there is just not anything that they did that I’m not in love with. AE: Their new live album is pretty impressive. CW: I know. And there’s this song of theirs that I’ve recently become slightly obsessed with called “Leeds.” Do you know this song?
AE: I don’t. CW: You have to hear it. I emailed [Emily] about it and she wrote back and said, “Will you please tell me why that song is important to you.” And I did. I wrote this very long letter and it had to do with-while I was in LA, something happened and I finally let go of something. That song was really the impetus for that. I gave my interpretation of what the song meant to me. It’s always interesting as a writer to hear what other people think your song is about or how it affects them. She sent me back a really great email, not saying, “Well, you’re crazy, that’s not what that song is about,” it was just basically, “I love this, I love that the song helped you in that way.” I think I’d give seven out of ten toes to write with her. I think I could get by with three toes.
AE: That would make for some difficult Manhattan walking. CW: All right, maybe I’ll give up three.
AE: How about you keep the outer toes so that you can maintain balance, but maybe give up the three middle toes on each foot? CW: Yes, I’d do that.
AE: I interviewed Amy Ray a few weeks ago and she talked about wanting to collaborate with Outkast. CW: That would be awesome.
AE: I thought so too. CW: The thing about the Indigo Girls is that they don’t stop growing. They have an incredible body of work and they’re still getting better if you can imagine it. They keep hitting a higher and higher mark. I feel sad when I look back and think about how my life would have been so much better if I had known about them. I feel sad for the time I didn’t know them. I’m mourning that.
AE: Speaking of influence, Stephanie Miller credits you as her “coming out coach.” When did you learn that she was going to come out on air? CW: I met Stephanie at Melissa Etheridge‘s birthday party. She walked up to me and said, “Chely Wright?” I knew who she was, I had seen her as a talking head on CNN and MSNBC for a long time, and I said, “You know who I am?” She said, “Of course I do. I love your book, I love that you just came out. I’m a huge gay rights activist and proponent of equality and I’m really proud of what you did.” Later, she said, “Call me when you get home next week, come into the studio and we’ll go on the air.”
The next week, I went in and we did the show and had a great time. We had a visit afterwards and a good talk. I became aware of her situation at that time. In my coming out I’ve been asked a lot, “Do you encourage people to come out?” I don’t. I would never be so reckless to across the board tell people to come out. Not everyone feels safe to do it and it’s personal.
So I would just listen [to Stephanie]. This began a friendship between us. I like funny, smart people and they don’t get funnier and smarter than that woman. She was very interested in my story and would ask, “How do you feel now? You’re glowing.” We had a mutual respect. We got together when I was in LA and went to dinner. I’m steadfast in my beliefs that there’s a difference between saying you’re for something and saying you are something. She’s said that I was annoying in my peaceful protest. She would say, “The gay community, I think they all know.” AE: I didn’t know. CW: That will make her feel good for having done it. She would say that she did so much for the gay community and I would say, “Look, I’m not saying that you’re not hugely helpful to the movement, you’re incredible.” If gay people around the world did half the things she did for the gay community, we would all be in better shape. But there’s a difference between cheering from the sideline and suiting up and saying, “I am this.” But again, I told her, “I don’t judge you and you do have to think about whether you’ll lose your voice. Are you willing to lose your voice?”
On Friday at about two in the morning my time I got a text that was basically an SOS. She called and said, “I’m going to come out today.” I said, “Please tell me that you’re not doing this out of fear, that you don’t feel threatened by anyone or anything.” She said, “I’m doing this for me.” She asked if I would stand by her and I said, “You know I will.” So we spent the next couple of hours and went through some things that she was going to say. I would say, “Okay don’t say that!” [Laughs] My friends at GLAAD would be so happy that I did this meeting with her before she came out. I haven’t listened to how it all went down but I hear she did a good job.
AE: She did. CW: Great. I didn’t know how to pull up the audio of it, but I looked at people typing in and I was so happy to see that she was getting so many different types of responses-“We love you” and “We had no idea.” One of the things I had been telling her for a while is that even if people think you are, they don’t know it until you say it and it’s powerful when you declare it.
There’s a particular brand of shame that women and men who can hide have and it all came to a head for me at Capital Pride in DC and Chicago Pride and at the San Francisco Pride Awards. I finally was able to articulate it to a very large crowd. I had to say I felt incredible pride… I’m happy to have your applause, but I want you to know I stand on your shoulders. I’m here because you have been here for so long.
This was the crux of my conversation with Stephanie in LA. I said, “We give ourselves too much credit to think we can come out and change everything. In an arc of a hundred years, we are just one little blip.” I said, “Are you going to be a blip or are you not going to be a blip?” And she said, “I want to be that.”
The folds of America are deep and for some people the gay conversation hasn’t even reached their county. When I do these in-stores, I have people say, “I drove five hours to be here. I think I’m the only gay person in my town.” It’s something we have to be aware of.
Mitchell Gold and I had dinner the other night and we were having this discussion about progress and how much more progress we still need. He asked me how I felt [about coming out] as oppose to how I thought I’d feel and I said, “I am over the moon.” I’m a thousand times more fulfilled than I ever thought I would be and it’s because of the people who come and sit by me. It’s not because I’m comforting them. With each person who puts their bottom in a seat next to me, I continue to be comforted because I spent 39 years of my life feeling alone. With every person that sits next to me, it’s somehow healing an old wound. It’s retroactive. It’s healing my old broken heart.
I’m involved with GLSEN, [the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.] I did a GLSEN summit a few weeks ago at the media center with seventeen kids that were chosen from around the nation to participate. These are gay and straight kids. There was one kid from Pennsylvania who was trying desperately to start a gay-straight alliance in his school and a teacher who was helping him finally came to him and said, “I can’t help you do this because I’m afraid the other teachers will think that I’m a lesbian.”
AE: How devastating. The person he turns to for help says she can’t because she fears people will think that she is like him. CW: I’m crying now just thinking about it. Here’s the worst part: though she wasn’t gay, I’m sure there are gay teachers at that school and they would be the ones most organically compelled to help him, but they won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. They are the ones who know they have to be involved, but they can’t.
Everything I had been talking in the press about the plight of young LGBT students was based on what I had read, basic supposition, but now after having spent three days with these kids, now I know. I sat at the LGBT Center downtown for hours with these kids. I was in their workshop and I did more listening than I did talking. I really wanted to hear what they had to say. I’m going to go back and start a chapter of GLSEN in my hometown of Wellsville, Kansas.
AE: Now that sounds like an amazing challenge. CW: Stay tuned.
