In 1997, Tony Brown produced Chely Wright’s third album Let Me In. It was her first album on MCA after having lost her initial record deal with Polydor when it folded its Nashville operation in 1996. Wright apparently reached out to Brown about the possibility of the two of them working together.
Let Me In was an unexpectedly strong album for Wright. She had been knocking on stardom’s door with her first two Harold Shedd produced albums, Woman in the Moon and Right in the Middle of It. Both albums failed to chart any top 40 singles.
Let Me In changed that and produced Wight’s first major radio hit with “Shut Up and Drive.” The song peaked at number 14 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs.
The emphasis on a softer, acoustic aesthetic was the perfect creative left-turn when much of mainstream Nashville was going the other way at the time. That being said, some insanely good, unappreciated classic traditional albums were recorded by women in 1996 and 1997, but that is for another day. The more organic production here highlighted Wright as a vocalist. Despite having originally been signed to a publishing deal as a songwriter, Brown asked Wright to lean more heavily into material written by others on this album.
Those others included Nashville powerhouses like Matraca Berg, Rivers Rutherford, Bob McDill, Gary Burr, Mark D. Sanders, and Kostas. Trisha Yearwood and Vince Gill provide background vocals. Among others, the studio musicians include Paul Franklin, Eddie Bayers, Matt Rollings, and Michael Rhodes. A hallmark of having Brown in the production seat is his consistent commitment to supporting and surrounding his artists with the best songs and musicians Music City had to offer. I have tried to highlight that in all the Flashback features which, to date, have all focused on lesser-known Tony Brown-produced artists.
Reading older online reviews tend to view this album as having a strong opening five songs with the back-end being full of fluff and filler, but I simply do not hear it that way. “10 lb. Heart” and “Before You Lie” are brilliant back-end compositions and wonderful vocal performances by Wright.
Gary Burr and Bob McDill co-wrote “Before You Lie.” Wright’s empathetic and patient vocals infuse the song with this amazing delicacy, respect, and fear. The chorus is a wonder of restraint and honesty. The listener feels like they are holding their breath as Wright is imploring her lover to take a breath before he lies.
“10 lb. Heart” is beautiful song about a “tender soul who is out of control” who is “overloaded with love.” This album closer feels like her chest is about to explode. Two years earlier Aaron Tippin sang about love hitting him like a ten pound hammer, here Wright sings about the love flowing from her swollen ten lb. heart.
One can easily enough hear the tension of Wright wrestling with her decision to not yet publicly come out as a lesbian at this point of her burgeoning career. The risk and thrill of such retrospection, however, is overburdening every musical decision with reckless speculation that may be true in spirit but false in fact. Wright would share her story in 2010, coinciding with the release of the Rodney Crowell produced Lifted Off the Ground and her memoir Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer.
Back in 1997, Wright lays out a collection of ten songs produced by Tony Brown that would sonically predict what she would later do with Rodney Crowell in terms of a sparer sound and almost folkie vibe.
“Shut Up and Drive” is quietly brilliant and deserved all the attention it received at radio. The urgency and tension of the interior monologue with “the voice you never listen to” is captivating. This is a great song, succinct and sure of its message. There is a palpable sense of danger as the narrator implores herself not to look in the mirror for fear of that look in his eyes that “strangles your will to survive.”
Many critics at the time rightfully celebrated “Emma Jean’s Guitar” as the highlight of the album. The song is written by Matraca Berg, Gary Harrison, and Jeff Hanna. It is hard not to admire a song that contains a level of detail best captured in the line “And you could tell by the fingerboard her painted nails were long.” The song explores the musical history of a 1950 Gibson guitar and stands confidently shoulder to shoulder with similar themed songs like Vince Gill’s “This Old Guitar and Me” and Jamey Johnson’s performance of Bill Anderson’s “The Guitar Song.”
I honestly don’t know where the missteps on this album are. “Just Another Heartache” and “Is it Love Yet?” should have been big radio hits in a more just world. The former was released as a single but only reached 39 on the Billboard singles chart.
The final single from Let Me In was “I Already Do,” a lovely, and laughter-infused, conversational confession of a song that the narrator shares with her partner that she has been in love with them for some time, closing with the great line, “Baby, the sun’s been up for hours.” It is the sweetest and tenderest of performances.
I wish the sun had come up on Wright’s career more than it has. She has recorded some brilliant songs across her eight studio albums despite not having the one definitive collection to showcase her significant talent as both a songwriter and singer.
Unfortunately, the ugly political underbelly of Nashville was fully exposed once Wright came out. She remains a LGBTQ activist today.
Let Me In allowed her sunlight to thankfully break through and shine the brightest with a lovely warmth and intimacy that still sounds great today.
I’ll admit that I’ve never been a huge fan of Wright’s music through any of the different phases of her career– “Jezebel” would be my pick for her best single, and it’s absurd that it wasn’t an actual hit– but she’s always seemed like such a grounded and cool human.
Friend of the blog Chris Willman published a tremendous interview with Wright earlier this week, in fact, in which she provides candid insights about her career as a recording artist and her pivot into C-suite leadership: https://variety.com/2025/music/news/chely-wright-country-singer-gay-iss-interview-1236444673/
“Shut Up and Drive” blew my mind in 1997. Just an amazingly constructed song that’s aged like a fine wine. She fits into that mold of modern, bold songwriterly types like Kim Richey or Matraca Berg. At the time, I didn’t know she was already on her third album.
I forgot about her again until “Single White Female”, which came out around the time I found a 1997 Crook & Chase in a cutout bin which happened to have “Shut Up and Drive” on it, and a review of “Woman in the Moon” in New Country magazine. While I vaguely recall “It Was” and “Never Love You Enough”, I don’t recall ever matching either to a singer. And I had zero memory of anything else until the notorious “Bumper of My SUV”. Even that I only ever heard on American Country Countdown, although WATZ did spin her “C’est La Vie” cover a few times and dug out “Jezebel” a few times circa 2006 (with the first such time fooling me into thinking it was new).
I’m at a loss as to why Chely never clicked. I feel like song quality (“Bumper” notwithstanding) was on her side. Maybe her singing voice made her just a bit TOO country in the Faith/Martina era. And unlike Sara Evans, her attempts to split the difference didn’t come as naturally, as evidenced by what a mess the “Never Love You Enough” album was.
Her coming out was a milestone for queer fans of country music, such as myself. And by all accounts she just seems to be a really great person. I’m glad that she’s still respected and getting her music noticed.
I loved Wright’s second Polydor album (Right In The Middle of It) and she released some very strong singles on MCA (I Already Do, It Was, even Single White Female). But my favorite record of hers has always been the absolutely devastating The River from her Metropolitan Hotel album; it was probably too somber for radio, but in a just world it would’ve been a career record.
I was also a long-time Chely Wright champion from the moment I saw that debut video for “He’s a Good Ol’ Boy”. I was thrilled for her long overdue chart success with “Shut Up and Drive” and even more thrilled when she fully hit the big time with “Single White Female”. “It Was” my favorite of her hits. Very disappointing how it so quickly faded after that. Tough call on whether there was any point on her career timeliness where coming out would have been an asset rather than a liability. It’s always been ambiguous what country fans or Nashville insiders would be willing to accept or embrace in terms of either race or orientation.
I’m not certain coming out affected her one way or the other. It certainly didn’t impact her standing at country radio, as she was a decade removed from her too brief peak with Single White Female (and I don’t think MCA attempting to “diva” her up with Never Love You Enough helped her cause much). It may have affected her touring-wise, that much I’m not sure of.
I know that one impact was that she wasn’t invited back to the Opry for almost a decade. She was a regular up until that point.
Like MarkMinnesota, I was also a long-time Chely Wright fan from the time I saw that debut video for “He’s a Good Ol’ Boy”, which was a cover of an Arlene Harden song from 1968 (like Wright, Harden never became a big star since she was buried on an overloaded Columbia label).
I have all seven of Chely’s chart run albums – they are all good-to-very-good. I really have no good explanation as to why she didn’t hit with radio. I thin maybe Bobby was correct in observing that perhaps her singing voice was TOO country in the Faith/Martina era (which probably explains why I always preferred her to Martina and Faith. Landing on Dualtone probably didn’t help her much, since they did not have much promotional oomph.