It still haunts him, what happened on the bus after a show in Missoula, Montana. It was 2017, and Chase Rice, on tour to support his album Lambs & Lions, had ordered a bunch of barbecue from a local restaurant and thought it might be a nice gesture to invite the catering crew to watch his performance before dropping off the meal.
But once they got on the bus, Rice noticed a “vibe shift.” “They were dickheads,” Rice says, sitting at an East Nashville coffee shop in a black-and-white John Lennon-inspired ringer tee, purchased during a recent trip to New York. The barbecue guys, clearly not fans of the bro-country sound that Rice had long been associated with, didn’t seem impressed by his songs, and things only got worse when they all started talking about music. “One kid brought up John Prine and I said, ‘Who is John Prine?’”
If it sounds awkward, it was — the kind of moment that most people would swear their crew to secrecy over, and never utter another word about in public. But Rice, after starting his career as a co-writer on Florida Georgia Line’s bro-country Rosetta Stone, “Cruise,” and becoming a poster boy for the never-ending party, is the first one to call himself out. Over the course of our conversation, he will refer to himself as “a watered-down, shittier version of FGL,” describe some of his old songs as “so fucking bad” and, yes, admit in public to not having known who John Prine was as recently as seven years ago. And he’ll do it all with a smile on his face.
That doesn’t mean he wasn’t embarrassed. “Oh, I was,” says Rice, who grew up in North Carolina on a pretty exclusive diet of George Strait, Chis LeDoux, and football, though he isn’t trying to make excuses. Unlike the bulk of his peers, he was willing to admit where he needed to grow when he realized how narrow his country music worldview was. It just took a while to get there.
When “Cruise” was released in 2012, and all through its reign, the genre was splitting at the seams: the mainstream, radio-friendly bros on one side, and the more Americana-adjacent records by Prine, Jason Isbell, and Sturgill Simpson on the other. Back then, Rice wasn’t having it. He was radio or bust, and his version of country was the only one there was. “When those guys hit, I wanted nothing to do with it,” Rice says. “And I was wrong. Way off.”
He started listening to as much Prine — and anything else from the country, folk, and Americana catalogs he might have missed in favor of chasing chart success — as he could. “I mean, it’s just sad on my part, how far removed I was from anything not mainstream.” He shakes his head before adding, “but it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
The Prine incident was just one in a series of events that led to Rice’s newest album, Go Down Singin’, which finds him fully departed from his bro-country past and writing thoughtful country ballads and murder songs with the likes of Lori McKenna. When he stopped trying to conjure the bro bacchanal, something different came out — songs like “Haw River,” written about Catholic priests sexually assaulting indigenous women in a small North Carolina town, and ones in tribute to his father, who died when Rice was 22. Rice’s knack for a good melody is still well intact (love or hate “Cruise,” it’s hard to deny that it’s one of the stickiest country bops of the 2000s), but this time it’s used to tell a good story, not fit into a radio algorithm. His wants to collaborate with bands like Flatland Calvary someday, and he’s trying to do what creative people are supposed to: grow and change.
What would the barbecue guys think? Are bros allowed a redemption arc? Does poptimism end where country music begins? Rice knows he’s constantly “battling the history of what I’ve done to myself,” but for once, has stopped worrying about where the songs will land, and realized that the best art exists not by trying to get a bloated Number One, nor by trying to adhere to some purist outlaw notion, either. It’s the organic sweet spot in the middle: put your window down and cruise.
Still, he gets excited when I tell him Go Down Singin’ is categorized as “Americana” on Apple Music. “Holy shit, fuck yeah. That’s a big deal for me,” he says, pausing for a minute to roll the whole idea around in his head before adding another “fuck yeah” for good measure.
BEFORE WE SAT DOWN TO TALK, Rice asks if we’ve met before. We have. We spoke in 2017, around the time of Lambs & Lions, when he was at the beginning of his existential musical crisis. Rice recognizes my face, but he’s surprised to hear that anyone from Rolling Stone felt he was worth an interview then. “Rolling Stone is good and authentic and I wasn’t,” he says. “I was so lost, and I had no fucking clue what I was doing.” He takes out his iPhone and scrolls through his own Spotify page to remind himself of the songs from that time period. He grimaces, then proceeds to make fun of another one of his albums, called The Album. “It’s wild I just called it…The Album.”
Though the music on Lambs & Lions was still darting around to find a landing, it was clear that Rice was on the precipice of a breakthrough. He was unhappy with his bro-country past, but he wasn’t quite sure how to navigate his way out of it. Parroting FGL wasn’t working, so he tried to be Sam Hunt, and that didn’t do it either. When Rice wrote something just as himself, not worrying where it would fit or what trend it chased, he’d bank it as “good for down the road,” some amorphous time in the future when he could do what he wanted outside of Music Row. “Songs I didn’t have the balls to put out, really,” he says. “Because I was just trying so hard to be popular.”
Then Covid hit. Rice, eager to play live again, scheduled a show before vaccinations were available. Rolling Stone and other outlets called him out for it, and some of his peers chimed in, too.
“Looking back, it was too early,” he says, shaking his head. Soon after, he deleted his social media and, with nothing left to scroll on the couch at his Tennessee farm, started watching a Bruce Springsteen documentary. And then he wrote a song with the same handful of chords he’d learned on the guitar as a college student, a solace of a habit when his prospects for a career in the NFL disappeared after an injury. “It wasn’t very good, but it was true to me,” Rice says, thinking he’d stuff it away with the “good for down the road” material. This time, however, he changed his mind. “I was done trying to be everyone else. I wanted to be my fucking self.”
With the urging of some friends who listened to more left-of-center country and Americana, and a growing catalog of Prine and other albums he’d missed along the way, Rice spent the next few years writing the songs that would become 2023’s Oscar Charles-produced I Hate Cowboys & All Dogs Go to Hell. He was truly proud of the work for once, which he thought might get a little love come CMA Awards season (it didn’t). And when the album’s only radio-friendly song, “Bad Day to Be a Cold Beer,” stalled, he realized he couldn’t give his label, BBR Music Group, what they had wanted: radio hits. They signed one thing, and Rice had become another, and he got out of his contract to become a fully independent artist.
Rice’s new album, Go Down Singin’, is an excellent collection of poignant, often anthemic country that bridges the gap between his approachable mainstream catalog and his newfound story-focused style. It doesn’t feel like he’s trying to be some carbon copy of an Americana star, just a more refined, emotionally vulnerable version of what he does best. Turns out Rice can paint a vibrant tale just as well as he could get the party started.
“Haw River” is one of the album’s most surprising songs. Unlike many in country music who tend to glamorize every second of America’s past, Rice wanted to start seeing the other side. He’d been watching the show 1923 and couldn’t get its portrayal of Catholic priests raping indigenous girls and women out of his head, particularly as a man of faith himself. “That’s the history of our country and it still happens today,” Rice says, who spun the story into a haunting murder ballad. “Why are we afraid to sing about it? There’s no reason to shy away from the truth.”
Some of the album’s standout songs are the McKenna co-writes — a collaborator who had turned Rice down for the majority of his career. She changed her mind when she heard “Bench Seat,” off I Hate Cowboys, recognizing a bubbling talent that wasn’t quite so apparent in his bro days. One of the songs they wrote together, “You in 85,” is a heartbreaking tribute to his late father, and “That Word Don’t Work No More” features McKenna on vocals with Rice’s sounding stronger and more in control than ever.
Photo: Ben Christensen
Rice is just as excited though, if not more, about songs he’s banked for his next album, which he plans to call Eldora, inspired by the Colorado town where it was written. The title track is about a relationship, and, though it doesn’t mention what happens outright, the subtext is that he’s singing about a couple trying to heal after an abortion (his stance on the topic? “I’ve never been in that situation, why should I have an opinion about it?”). He’s so excited about the work that he has a hard time focusing on Go Down Singin’, because he’s finally more hopeful about the future than he is embarrassed about his past.
“Chase is doing what all my favorite artists do at some point in their career — evolve,” says Charlie Worsham, who was gotten to know Rice while on tour with Dierks Bentley this year. “Country music is all about the hero’s journey. One particular version of it can be heard in songs like ‘I Saw the Light,’ in which the prodigal son or daughter returns and claims redemption. I believe Chase is finding redemption and claiming some peace and ownership surrounding his story and how it should be told.”
A friendship with Worsham wasn’t something that would have been on Rice’s old bingo card, but he’s thrilled about it. He, Worsham ,and Florida Georgia Line’s Tyler Hubbard all regularly get together in a group to talk about what they’re going through: not about music, but about feelings. “The old way of thinking was you couldn’t do that,” Rice says. “Having good men in my life has changed my life.” (For the record, he’s still friends with both sides of FGL, though he is “friendly separate” with them, after the band parted ways).
It’s not just FGL that’s split. Country is at a divide once again. Relative polar opposites Zach Bryan and Morgan Wallen are both selling out stadiums (though both artists are, true to country’s favorite common ground, white men). What’s different now than in 2012 is that sounding country is welcome. Fiddles and banjo are making their way back onto mainstream records, and artists like Thomas Rhett are leaving behind attempts at a more pop-oriented career to return to country, or at least their version of it.
Rice is skeptical that it will stick around. “It’ll go back the other way,” he says, and though he’s a big fan of both Bryan and Wallen, he’s not too pleased with what else is out there. “I am hearing some stuff and I’m like, ‘This is so fucking terrible.’ But I’m the last guy that should say that.”
Rice, clearly, is hard on himself. But he’s also not trying to bury what he once was, either, so he doesn’t run from “Cruise.” He still plays it live, but now it’s acoustic on the guitar with some pedal steel. “Who knew the biggest bro anthem of all time, and one of the biggest songs in country music history, could be so damn country?” Worsham says, who got to hear it first-hand on the road. “I mean it! No sarcasm here.”
Worsham is right, because “Cruise” does sounds country. But the song was country a decade ago, too. The difference now is intention — it’s not just the music you make, it’s also why you’re making it.
Recently, Rice was watching a video that his tour manager dug up of the first time he played Red Rocks, about 10 years ago, where he’s running around the stage, waving his arms, trying to get the crowd going like a wedding hype man. He was revisiting it, because, in August, he found himself at the famed Colorado venue once again, opening for Bentley, and everything was different. He was different.
“I just sat there and enjoyed playing the guitar. I barely moved,” Rice says, in awe of how much more he was able to connect with the crowd just by leaning on the lyrics. “And it was so much better. I’m in love with music for the first time in my whole career, instead of just partying my ass off.”
