Chely Wright believes she is exactly where she should be.
She lives in Nashville, her dream home since she was a little girl in Wellsville, Kan. She has supportive friends and family. And she makes her living making music, her ambition for 22 years, since she was 4 years old.
Wright’s third album, “Let Me In,” was released recently. It’s her first on the MCA label, and she is more than pleased with it.
“This is the one I’ve been waiting to make,” Wright said in a phone call from her home in Nashville recently. “Not that the others weren’t good; it’s just that everything came together for me.”
Her current single from the album, “Shut Up and Drive,” is climbing the charts, and she and her management team are deciding what to release as the second single. It might be “Your Woman Misses Her Man,” a song she wrote with Ed Hill and Mark D. Sanders, or it might be “Just Another Heartache,” written by Hill and Sanders.
Her personal favorite on the album won’t likely be a single; it’s just not the kind of song that radio plays.
The song, “Emma Jean’s Guitar,” written by Gary Harrison, Jeff Hanna and Matraca Berg, is a nostalgia piece that wonders what stories a 1950 Gibson might have to tell if only it could speak.
“The song reminded me of when I was 17 years old and living in Branson by myself,” Wright said. “I was living in a trailer park. A neighbor was selling a guitar — I didn’t ask him why — and I wanted to buy it. I had about $70 hidden in the hole in the wall where the washer hookup used to be, and I managed to scrape up $130. He wanted $150, but he took what I had.
“I used to fantasize that Dolly Parton had played it or that it had been on `Hee Haw’ or something.”
She still has the guitar, a 1973 Yamaha.
Calling the guitar song “a hidden gem,” Wright talked about the depth of her album, how it showcased several styles of music and songs.
“That’s what’s missing on albums now,” she said. “So many of them are geared to four singles. An album should have different places to go, different nuances. There should be depth.”
Some of her favorite albums, she said, had special songs that never made it to the airwaves. They were more personal but too subtle to sell to a broadcast audience. What matters to Wright is the music. Always has been. “I always knew that this is how I’d make my living,” she said.
