- Country singer Chely Wright announced her new role as senior vice president of corporate social responsibility and new market growth at ISS
- Wright, who in 2010 became the first major country star to come out as gay, opens up about the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace
- She reveals what the new job means for her music career
Country star Chely Wright recently introduced the world to a new member of her family: a tiny Cavapoo puppy. George and Everett, the 11-year-old twin sons Wright shares with wife Lauren Blitzer, had been “begging for a dog,” she says, and when their parents finally relented, the boys had the perfect name at the ready: Lucky.
While the name certainly fits the family’s new addition, it’s also an apt way to describe Wright as of late.
Once known to the world as Wright the country singer, then as Wright the openly gay country singer, the star, 54, is now embracing a new role: Wright the senior vice president of corporate social responsibility and new market growth at the facilities management/workplace experience company ISS, which she officially announced on Tuesday, March 25.
“I think I’m the luckiest person alive,” she tells PEOPLE. “I try not to say no to things and I try to say yes to opportunities that come along. And this one was an undeniable opportunity.”
Though it may seem a bit out of left field for a country music star to swap the stage for a corporate 9-5, Wright is no stranger to the business world, having previously worked for the global design firm Unispace as Chief Diversity Equity and Inclusion Officer.
She’s always had something of an entrepreneurial spirit; in first grade, she had her own paper route, and at 16, she managed a local gas station on Sundays in her native Kansas. In 1999, the same year her hit “Single White Female” went No. 1, she founded the nonprofit Reading, Writing and Rhythm Foundation to support music education in schools, and has also worked closely with organizations like GLSEN, GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign since becoming the first major country star to come out as gay in 2010.
But it’s largely thanks to COVID that she made her latest pivot. Wright was on tour when the pandemic began in March 2020, and like all other working musicians, was forced to cancel her shows, pack up and go home. She thought things would pick back up in April — but once she realized they wouldn’t, she switched course.
“I told my wife about two weeks into COVID, I said, ‘Babe, I think I’m about to make a pivot,’” she recalls. “She said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘I think COVID is bigger than we really realize.’ My manager and I had a conversation. I said, ‘Let’s hit the pause button here because it doesn’t seem like this is going to change.’ I never would have made the full leap [if not for COVID].”
The “It Was” singer had had what she calls her “side hustle” doing culture work in corporate spaces as a consultant for the past decade. So when COVID hit, and as the world reeled from the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, those clients came knocking, wanting to host inclusion workshops and virtual events that created safe spaces for connection amid uncertainty.
“It was, dare I say, the perfect storm which really accelerated conversations around leadership, belonging and inclusion,” she says. “I was so uniquely positioned, being the only music artist that I knew that had a foot in the corporate world.”
Wright took on Unispace as a client, and when they offered her a full-time role, she accepted, eager for the opportunity to advance belonging and inclusion through the storytelling lens.
It’s a skillset she says transfers surprisingly well from her music career, where she always loved the business side of things anyway. And at ISS, she’s ready to share her experience with the company’s 320,000 employees — especially amid the current political climate, as President Donald Trump continues to work to eliminate diversity initiatives.
“I force people to say it out loud: diversity, equity and inclusion,” she says. “For companies like ISS and the clients that we have… you are creating environments where people belong and feel safe. I couldn’t be more proud to be at a company who is not stepping away from the key tenets of inclusion and belonging. We’re leaning into it because we know it matters. And I think, everybody hold steady, we’re going to be okay. This is a moment in time and the arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice.”
That’s not to say leaping into the corporate world came without trepidation for Wright. She’d already had what she calls “a bit of an identity crisis” in 2010, when she came out publicly as a lesbian.
But part of being able to get through that period of her life was making the conscious decision to let go of how others perceived her — and how she perceived herself.
“‘Oh, that’s who I used to be. That’s who I thought I was. That’s how the world knows me.’ I began letting go of what when I came out of the closet because I knew I was going to challenge my identity,” she says.
It worked, and Wright — who married Blitzer in 2011 — says that in the 15 years since, she believes things have “1,000%” improved for queer people, especially in the country music sphere (“One famous celebrity that has come out calls me her gay whisperer. It’s the honor of a lifetime to get to do that,” she says).
And now, if she’s gone corporate, can she still identify as a singer-songwriter? The answer is, of course, yes.
“I write a little bit every day. It’s just the songwriter in me. I’ve got a voice memo from yesterday with a melody that I can’t get out of my head,” says Wright, whose most recent EP, Revival, came out in 2019. “Music’s not done with me and I don’t think I’ll ever be done with music. It’s in my DNA, it’s part of who I am. I won’t say I don’t lead ‘Happy Birthday’ at work for some of our colleagues, so I’m still singing and I will make another record, but for now, this is such an incredible [opportunity].”
The star — who says she 98% back to herself after a stroke in 2018 — is also hard at work on a musical adaptation of her 2010 memoir Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer, the rights to which were acquired by actress Jean Smart’s SmartAngel Entertainment.
“The universe tapped me on the shoulder said, ‘Oh hey, COVID, you’re going to say yes to a new, what I call, my third life,” she says. “I think my second life was when I came out and my career changed very dynamically and I think I’m on my third life. Now I wonder, what the heck is my fourth life going to be?”
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