Country star Thomas Rhett says he’s never heard the phrase “wife guy” before, but he has a pretty intuitive understanding of the phenomenon, the all-purpose internet descriptor for what happens when a marriage becomes a part of a meme. “I feel like I’ve seen some of those, and some of them make me really cringe,” the singer, born Thomas Rhett Akins, tells Vanity Fair a few days before the release of his seventh studio album, About a Woman. “The whole setting your phone on your dashboard and saying, ‘I’m playing this song for my wife for the first time’? I’m like, No, you’re not.”
So while Rhett doesn’t want to be one of those viral wife guys, he admits that his wife, Lauren Akins, is a big part of his persona, publicly and privately. “A lot of the things I am today are because of her, and so many of my personality traits were not what they are today 10 years ago,” he says. “She loves so deeply and so hard, and I’m a very passionate human being, so we kind of do everything a million percent. I think that’s why it’s so easy to write about her.”
The “woman” in About a Woman is obviously Lauren, the childhood friend he married in 2012. If you don’t know Thomas Rhett for the 20 Country Airplay number ones he’s netted in the last decade, you might know him for the picture-perfect family snapshots shared by the couple on Instagram. On the new record, Rhett delivers a tight collection of pop-country love songs inspired by his nearly 12-year marriage, written and recorded with the hopes that they’ll be something his wife and four daughters can dance to.
Rhett thinks he succeeded, and Lauren has been participating in this promotional cycle like never before. “It’s her favorite record that I’ve made, because it is uptempo and even the songs that aren’t uptempo, they have a bounce and they’ve got a swagger to ’em,” he says. “I think she appreciates lyrics, but she’s more drawn to melody. We focused more on melody on this project than we ever have in the past, which was a huge change in pace for me because I’m such a lyric person. I obsess over lyrics and wordplay and how to flip stuff. And so I wanted to go in and make songs that felt simpler.”
On his quest to create danceable music, he tapped two friends and longtime collaborators to produce, Dann Huff and Julian Bunetta. Rhett said Bunetta, a songwriter and producer who got his start working on some of One Direction’s hits, in particular helped him focus on making something less cerebral. “In the past I’ve always had to have this crazy-deep answer for why I chose a song,” Rhett says. “Julian was a great adviser on this project. He would ask, Well, do you love it? I’m like, Yeah. He’s like, Why? I’m like, I don’t know. I think I’ve learned that that is an okay-enough answer for a song rather than being like, Well, there was this wildflower that I saw when I was driving from Austin to Tupelo.”
Bunetta has been working with Rhett since 2016, but as the two wrote songs in 2023, Bunetta was also working on a few different projects that would make him one of pop music’s most in-demand names—“Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter and “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims. Bunetta’s disco sheen blankets the record without clouding Rhett’s country croon, giving even the songs that feel like outtakes from Elvis or the Rolling Stones a modern glow.
Rhett was writing love songs for Lauren years before it became a part of his identity as an artist. “It never was a strategy for me. It never was like, Maybe I can make marriage cool and love cool,” he says. “When I sat down at a piano or guitar, that’s just what came out. My dad always told me to write about what I know the best, and I know her the best.”
One of those love songs, “Die a Happy Man,” off his 2015 album, came along with a video that starred Lauren. It won song of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards, got Rhett noticed outside of the genre for the first time, and turned Lauren into a public figure. She’s a natural in front of the camera—she’s got a winning smile and a speaking voice that draws a listener in—but this isn’t exactly where she was hoping to be after she graduated from the University of Tennessee with a nursing degree more than a decade ago.
The couple tied the knot after Rhett signed a record deal but before his career took off, and neither he nor Lauren really expected that he would find lasting success in the industry. “There was a part of her that probably was like, Oh, we will do this for a couple years, and then he’ll get a normal job and I’ll be a nurse,” he says. His career took off incredibly quickly, however, and eventually those plans changed. “When our marriage counselor said that [Lauren] should tour with me for the whole first year, I think it broke her heart a little bit because she had spent the last five years grinding. I think she saw herself working from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. in a hospital.”
The pair eventually came to a compromise when Lauren began traveling to Uganda to take part in medical mission trips. Back in 2017 the couple adopted their daughter Willa Gray, whom Lauren met on one of those trips, and about 13 weeks later Lauren gave birth to Ada James. Daughter Lennon Love followed less than three years later. In a short film for the Christian organization I Am Second, which came out earlier this summer, Lauren opened up a bit about the struggles presented by balancing parenthood and life on the road. “His life went on and I felt like mine stopped, and I felt like we weren’t doing it together anymore,” she said. “There was a lot of miscommunication. There was a lot of resentment I was holding on to.” The couple’s marriage looked ideal on social media, but behind the scenes they felt like they were fraying. After their fourth daughter, Lillie Carolina, was born in 2021, Lauren dealt with severe postpartum depression.
“People have always looked at us like we are just perfect, and that we don’t argue and that we don’t have issues,” Rhett says. “But Instagram is a highlight reel of your life in many ways. So in the last couple years, we’ve really tried to get out of that ‘couple goals’ hashtag thing. We are freaking normal human beings. I happen to do a job that a lot of people pay attention to and notice and critique and all the things, but we live a very normal life.”
To make it work, Rhett says that he had to change how he approached his career and parenting, and though he relishes bringing the whole family on the tour bus during summers off from school, part of it has meant traveling alone. “Through tons of talking with my wife and being really honest about it, it’s like, Hey, when I go do this thing, I think I just need to go alone so that I can be a million percent doing that, so that when I come home, I feel like I’ve nailed what I needed to do, and now I can really be a present husband and a present father.”
About a Woman meets the couple where they are now, a rebirth following a few years of struggle. In explaining their current mindset, he compares the different phases of a long marriage to the seasons of a year. “We’re having such a great time right now in our marriage because it’s a new season. Our kids are in school five days a week, so we have time to work out, play pickleball together, do what we want to do,” he says. “I think the ups and the downs of marriage are what make a marriage really strong. It’s how you deal with those moments. I’ve just watched my wife grow in so many amazing ways, and I hope she would say she’s watched me grow in so many amazing ways. It makes me so excited about today, and it makes me so excited about the future.”
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