During Rob + Holly’s Friday Night Takeover, Chase Rice joined us for an interview where he filled us in on practically everything going on in his life at the moment. From sharing where he finds song ideas, to his collaboration and relationship with Florida Georgia Line, to reliving that one wild moment from The Bachelor, Rice lets us in on a whole heap of career-related details.
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This year Chase has had more time than usual to be out in the woods hunting. While things have slowed down for so many of us, Rice believes that this downtime will lead to a “renaissance period” in music once the pandemic no longer presents a threat to our safety. While out in the woods Rice tells us he gets to clear his mind, which often allows for great song lyrics to creep in.
“For me when I’ve been trying to write the best songs, try to write this, try to write that it doesn’t happen," says Chase. He explains that his song “Eyes On You” was born out of one of those moments where he wasn’t trying to write a song and his mind was clear.
Rice’s newest song “Drinkin’ Beer. Talkin’ God. Amen.” which features Florida Georgia Line, certainly possesses an addictive quality that makes you want to listen to it “over and over again,” which Chase reveals was his goal for the new porch song. After finding a note on his phone that read “Drinkin’ Beer. Talkin’ God.
Amen.” Chase and his team took off on writing the song. “We wrote the hell out of it, it worked it. It was an easy write, that’s when you know you’ve got something pretty special,” says the Country star.
FGL got involved with Rice’s new track because Chase and Brian Kelley actually have a history together. Chase tells us, “Brian Tyler and I, of FGL, we lived in a house together back in 2010… they’d been here a couple of years in Nashville and I’d just move to town. And Brian and I played Little League Soccer, Little League Baseball together, so we’d known each other since the time we were little kids, so then we started music together, we wrote “Cruise” together. Their career took off and mine started doing this over here so it’s like we didn’t see each other the last ten years, we’d been so busy.”
However, in the last couple of years, Brian and Chase have reconnected and have been exchanging texts. “I think you just kinda go do your own thing for a while and then you come back together with the people that were there in the beginning,” shares Rice. “That’s huge for us. To be able to reconnect, to be able to not just be buddies, but to be able to do music together again is really special because we were doing music together before anybody cared about anything we were doing.”
FGL, Chase, and Corey Crowder all produced the new track together and once they were all in the studio as a team, Brian Kelley and Tyler Hubbard felt the track would be even more special if they all recorded it together as well.
Chase was involved with writing FGL’s track “Cruise,” which greatly helped launch the duo’s career in 2012. Now that Chase, Brian, and Tyler are all back together on “Drinkin’ Beer. Talkin’ God. Amen.” the track serves as a full-circle moment for the three Country stars. On the new song Rice explains, “and now we’ve got all these years later, we’ve got one together, another one that’s going to continue to push along Country music whichever way it’s going for our group of people.” Rice loves that Country music can go in so many different directions these days and says that various artistic choices and directions are “the beauty of music in general.”
WATCH MORE: World Premiere: Chase Rice and Florida Georgia Line - “Drinkin’ Beer. Talkin’ God. Amen”
In Rice’s 2019 track “Lonely If You Are” from The Album, Pt.1 the singer references The Bachelor, which immediately reminds fans of the awkward moment that took place between him and The Bachelor’s Victoria Fuller.
During his conversation with Rob + Holly, he shares, “it’s the type of situation where if cameras aren’t rolling it’s not uncomfortable at all, it’s like ‘oh that’s kind of weird, but whatever.’ It was all for show I’m sure, they got blind-sided as well obviously, but they signed up for the show, I didn’t, so it was frustrating for sure because I’m just going on there to promote a song. I like to keep my personal life my personal life… I just see all this stuff blown out publicly, and now ever since that happened I’m like, ‘oh my god, what can you even believe any more of what’s being put out into the public.’”
Regardless, Rice says he wouldn’t change anything about the moment. “The night that it aired I was actually in Amsterdam feeling real good.” While he didn’t watch the episode that night, Rice made sure to use the moment to promote his new album at the time and make the awkward scene all about the release of his new music.
While at a Dutch bar, in a very un-sober state, Chase’s phone started blowing up and he says “we ended up watching just the segment, it was like an eight-minute segment on YouTube the next day, and I was like ‘this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’”
While Chase made the most of the national attention he got from The Bachelor and he made sure his music was front and center, the artist is now on to bigger collabs and new tracks as we await the “musical renaissance” of 2021.
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