O Bro, Where Art Thou? Chase Rice Finds His Way Back to Country Music
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. He wants to collaborate with bands like Flatland Calvary someday, and he’s trying to do what creative people are supposed to: grow and change.
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