Chris Daughtry on Why He Opened up About His Relationship's Highs and Lows on New Single (Exclusive)

When Chris Daughtry appeared on Season 5 of American Idol in 2006, ending up in fourth place, he went from playing in clubs to being a household name. The sudden fame took a toll on every area of his life, including his marriage to his wife, Deanna. Daughtry's new single, "As You Are," was written by Deanna, and sums up the highs and lows of their lives, including her openness about her bisexuality, and Daughtry's admission of infidelity, refusing this time to hold anything back.

"I think you live long enough keeping things away from people and feeling this sense of inauthenticity," Daughtry told PopCulture.com. "When people are like, 'You're such a good family man,' or 'You're such a good this, you're like, 'If you only knew.' And you start to kind of just be at peace with that and the best thing to do is just put it all out there."

Perhaps surprisingly, neither Daughtry nor Deanna were afraid to bare their deepest and darkest secrets with the world, even though they knew the ramifications of their brutal honesty.

"It was something that we had dealt with together and had moved past," explained the singer. "But at the same time, it was like, 'Okay. Just in case you think this is all perfect, and it's been perfect this whole time, I'm here to prove you wrong.'"

Some artists might have been afraid that sharing such a painful memory would be harmful to a career, but Daughtry found the opposite to be true, with many finding inspiration in the singer.

"I think it made them feel more connected, just feeling like they know me more," the North Carolina native acknowledged. "Or feeling like 'Ah, he's being real. He's not trying to put on this facade,' that many people think that this, is. Because of where I came from, they have this idea of what our life is like and what we're like as a couple. I think it just gets old, hearing all the wrong interpretations of or ideas that people create in their head. And so it was like, 'You know what? Psyche!'"

Part of the now-resolved issues stemmed from Daughtry's sudden rise to stardom, before he had time to understand what was happening.

"I don't know if I had a lot of time to really process it.," Daughtry conceded. "It was just this really catapult into – there was no obscurity anymore. There was no anonymity. For two or three years, I couldn't go anywhere without people coming up to the table where we were eating. and I think it made it a little worse because they felt that they had something to do with that. So it was almost like 'You owe me.'"

"And there was a lot of that attitude behind it at first, and I think that was one of the hardest things to deal with, was that feeling like they can intrude, or even slightly be rude at times because I owed that to them," he continued. "That was the hardest part to deal with. It wasn't the fact that people knew who I was. I kind of relished in that. Growing up wanting to be a rock star, I had the idea of what that was like, and so the attention wasn't the issue, it was kind of the attitude behind it."

Download "As You Are" on iTunes.

Photo Credit: Getty / Jim Spellman