Country singer Ty Herndon, 63, is coming clean in a brand new memoir, in which he's openly reliving some of the toughest parts of his life. For decades, Herndon struggled privately with his gay identity, as well as religious trauma, substance use, bogus marriages, an arrest, and mental health issues, including self-harm.
Now he's telling his story on his own terms. "I figured it was finally time to reclaim my own story," Herndon tells Parade, "and put the ghosts of the past to bed once and for all."
Herndon started his country music career with the band The Tennessee River Boys before he ultimately went solo, signing on with Epic Records. In 1995, his single “What Mattered Most”—also the title of his new memoir—hit No. 1 on the Billboard Country Singles charts.
Soon after this big career win, however, an undercover officer arrested Herndon at a Texas park, an account which is detailed in a recent interview with The Guardian, and charged him with drug possession and indecent exposure. It would be almost two decades after this that Herndon would make the decision to come out publicly in 2014, becoming the "first openly gay male country superstar." And still, his troubles didn't end there.
There would still be a long journey of self-discovery that included, for Herndon, confronting internalized homophobia, cracking open his relationship with substance use, and doing his best to right some past wrongs—all of which he shares about in the book.
"Trauma has a way of wrecking you until you don’t recognize your own house anymore," Herndon tells Parade. "For years, I lived in the basement of my own life, afraid to go upstairs because I was afraid of what the light might reveal. This book is about the slow, messy work of climbing those stairs, one painful step at a time, until I remembered how to live in the whole house."
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Herndon shares the details of his path to recovery in the book, too. For now, he shares with Parade, "There’s no finish line when it comes to healing; there’s just a series of better days." He says, "My big win isn't a trophy or a chart-topper anymore. It’s the fact that when a shadow falls over my life now, I don't immediately reach for a way to numb it. I’ve learned to sit in the dark until my eyes adjust, knowing that the morning always shows up if you just allow it.”
Herndon and his husband Alex Schwartz married in 2023.
What Mattered Mostby Ty Herndon hits bookshelves Tuesday, March 31, 2026.
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