Chely Wright's 2010 CD, Lifted Off The Ground. Photo courtesy of Vanguard Records.

Falling in love is such a wonderful, exciting experience that songwriters devote vast amounts of time reminding fans how special it is. When Chely Wright fell in love, she feared it could cost her the job she’d always dreamed of doing. So she kept it to herself and covered her tracks. Her joy produced a huge amount of fear.

Breaking up, on the other hand, is a traumatic experience. But like falling in love, it’s a drama that songwriters feel compelled to write about. When people lose a relationship, they often have to share it — ad nauseum — with their very closest friends. When Chely broke up, she had to endure the pain in isolation. Her friends, family and business associates weren’t supposed to know about the relationship in the first place. She certainly couldn’t share her heartbreak.

That’s the mess in which Chely found herself in January 2006 when she came close to killing herself. She had split with a girlfriend, was broken-hearted and unable to share it. She was essentially a hermit with a fan club. It was a lonely, frustrating experience — particularly because she felt like a phoney. It’s why she announced she was a lesbian last week, finally breaking the chains that kept her from connecting authentically with the people around her.

“If you were to ask a fan why they love country singers,” she writes in her autobiography, Like Me: Confessions Of A Heartland Country Singer, “their answer would likely be ‘Because they are so real.’ Every time I heard a fan say that about me — and I did so often — it made me sick to my stomach. I was hiding a big part of myself from my fans, and I feared that most of them would not understand or approve of who I really was.”

Chely endured a lot of criticism for her public admission, which made her the first openly gay artist working in country music. Cynics accused her of trying to capitalize off her lifestyle. Others took her to task for making them consider the issue: “Why,” wrote one GAC reader, “must gays make a big deal out of it? Straight God-loving people don’t run around saying, ‘Look at me, I’m straight. So why do gays?’”

Straight people, however, have other ways of announcing themselves. They put a wedding band on their left finger, a not-so-subtle message that they have a partner. Chely’s fellow country artists routinely talk about their spouses, children and romantic attachments, another form of announcement.

Like it or not, Chely is finally giving herself permission to do the same. It was a risky act of courage. Those who were close to her that didn’t know might sever all ties. Her fan base could possibly dry up. She had no way of knowing in advance how people might react.

“It’s the hardest thing in the world to tell the ones we love that we’ve already built up relationships with,” she told me after the book’s release. “Those are the ones who can hurt the most by rejecting us. That’s what… writing my book was all about, putting a face next to the word gay to people who already gave me their stamp of approval.”

So how sheltered had Chely made herself? In June 2008, she packed up many of her possessions and moved to New York, removing herself from the life she knew so that she could finish writing her book and begin to contemplate the new life she was creating.

“No one really knew I left,” she noted, “and that should show you how detached a person in hiding gets from others in their life. When you move away from the city and nobody knows you’re gone, what kind of friendships do you have? Only a few people knew that I was gone.”

Chely’s new album Lifted Off The Ground, released in tandem with the book, is her most personal to date. Six of the 11 songs were written during the month that she thought about suicide. The titles alone — “Broken,” “Damn Liar,” “Notes To The Coroner” — are clues to her pain, and she knew she needed to be able to explain the album’s origins when she released it.

The judges on “American Idol” frequently push the contestants to be true to themselves in picking material and performing it on stage. That is, in essence, what Chely did in recording her album and writing the book. And in coming out.

Not everyone is happy with the results, but real artists don’t do things just to make other people happy. Everyone has skeletons. Real artists use their skeletons to inform their work. Chely’s coming-out event was “a spiritual, emotional, cerebral, creative experience,” she said, in part because she lived out that old adage that the truth shall set you free.

“As my friend Mary Karr, the famous poet and memoirist says, ‘Anyone who writes a memoir worth a crap cracks themselves open and really writes it.’”

The best part of it all for Chely: She moves forward as the real Chely Wright, not as the image she thinks others want her to be.

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