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.”
