When Ty Herndon recorded his debut single “What Mattered Most” on June 3, 1994, he didn’t know it would be one of his biggest hits, topping Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart and breaking a record held by Tracy Lawrence for most radio station adds in one week. He also didn’t know that, 25 years later, he would finally get the chance to re-record the song, which achingly chronicles lost love, as he’d longed to do: as an out gay man, proudly and honestly addressing his male lover.
“I wish I could have recorded this song this way 25 years ago, but country music wasn’t ready for that at that time,” Herndon tells the Scene, calling just before the reworked song’s release. “And really, quite honestly, I wasn’t as well, because I was not out. I was deep in the closet and in the middle of having a pretty awesome career. The stakes were high to come out with a song like that 25 years ago. But today I can.”
Herndon came out as gay in a 2014 interview with People. He calls his decision to re-record “What Mattered Most” a long-awaited personal catharsis. “At one time, I was in love with a beautiful blue-eyed boy with blond hair. I was in love for 14 years. I might have been singing the song one way in the studio, but I was thinking about something else.”
Another inspiration for changing the song is his work with LGBT youth through organizations like GLAAD. “One of the things I hear most is, ‘Hey, we really want to like country music, but we don’t feel like country music likes us,’ ” says Herndon. “I hear that so many times.”
Those sentiments have echoed in Herndon’s mind for years. But an emotional moment with a 14-year-old fan and his parents at a show in Dallas earlier this year clarified what he needed to do.
“They brought him backstage and said: ‘He just came out to us, and he wants to be a country artist,’ ” Herndon says. “I froze for a minute, and all I could do was look at the parents. I got very emotional. They probably thought I lost my mind. I gave them a big hug and said: ‘Just by bringing this kid here tonight, he already has a head start. And he has these affirming, awesome parents who love him.’ I didn’t say this, but we deal with a lot of suicides and homelessness. … These two awesome parents just overwhelmed me.
“I don’t want kids to be afraid of country music,” he continues. “Country has changed. There are still battles to be fought, but there’s a new generation coming up. I looked at this kid and said: ‘Dude, you don’t need to worry about your sexuality. You come into Nashville and be the best songwriter, artist, producer you can be, and the rest will fall into place.’ ”
Herndon also released a new music video for “What Mattered Most,” which features footage of him in the recording studio laying down new vocals for the updated version of the song. The video captures a raw, emotional moment for Herndon, who believed sharing such a full-circle experience on camera would be more powerful than any fictionalized interpretation of the song could.
“Making that beautiful video, with a lot of my friends in the room — who heard it for the first time — that was really emotional,” he says. “You see a lot of emotion from them and emotion from me in the video. The time gap — 25 years of that song came tumbling down on me in a glorious way. I told the video producers: ‘Make sure you get all of your lighting right and everything in place, because I only want to run through this a couple of times. After that, you really lose the emotion.’ I put them on the spot a little bit, but they really captured the heart of the song.”
Since coming out, Herndon has poured himself into advocacy work, including his Concert for Love and Acceptance, an annual benefit for GLAAD that takes place during CMA Fest. While the CMA has never recognized the benefit as an official CMA Fest event, the audience is always filled with festivalgoers wearing festival lanyards. Herndon says this fan support gives him hope for the direction country music is headed.
Advocacy work is only one of the many irons Herndon has in the fire. On Aug. 23, he’ll release Got It Covered, a compilation album featuring covers and rarities. He’s also working on an album of new solo material, which he hopes to release late this year. For the latter, he says fans can expect more songs with narratives about same-sex relationships. He doubts those songs will make it to country radio, but knows — as has happened with his Concert for Love and Acceptance — that it doesn’t take the approval of a traditional country gatekeeper to reach country fans.
“I want to know who [the radio stations] are if they do [play these songs],” he says, laughing. “I’ll fly out there and hug their necks. I don’t know that we’re there yet, that we’re going to hear a gay male singing about his boyfriend on country radio. But there’s satellite radio, Spotify — I think that’s a start.”
