Chris Daughtry - My Wife's Coming Out Story

The Rock Star And Wife Deanna Share Their Unique Journey— And A Secret She Kept Hidden

- Nancy Kruh

Platinum-selling rocker Chris Daughtry vividly recalls the disaster he created the first time his wife, Deanna, brought him lyrics to a song she’d written. “I was dismissive. I shut her down,” Chris, 39, says of the long-ago episode. “It was just so ignorant and juvenile of me.” So stinging was his rejection that Deanna, 46, needed many years to find the courage to try again—years that Chris also needed to understand the impact of what he’d done. Presented with a new set of his wife’s soul-baring lyrics in 2015, this time Chris actually read them. “It felt very real and very honest,” he says, sitting with Deanna in their Nashville home. “I instantly started hearing the chorus in my head.”

Today the song “As You Are” is the brand-new single offhis band Daughtry’s latest album. But the couple, who have been married for nearly 19 years, reveal that it’s much more than their first musical collaboration. The ballad is Deanna’s “coming out,” her victory in a lifetime struggle to embrace her bisexuality. The chorus, “I love you as you are,” is what Deanna is finally able to tell herself. “It’s very important for people to know what the song is about and where it really came from,” Chris says. “Otherwise we’re not being authentic.”