New music is coming from Chase Rice. Less than six months after Rice released his 11-track Go Down Singin' album, he is already working on a new record, one he hints fans will have sooner rather than later.
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"We're going to add three or four more, call it an album, and put it out early this year," Rice reveals to American Songwriter. "And that has nothing to do with why we even sat down. We sat down to talk about the Go Down Singin' record, which I love."
Rice is releasing music entirely on his own, as an independent artist. Not having a record label is a terrifying thought for many artists. For Rice, it means creative freedom, something he has been pursuing since his career began.
"I'm in love with music," Rice explains. "I'm not overthinking anything. I'm not having to wait on an album cycle. I'm not having to wait 52 weeks for a single to pop to drop the album. I have the ability to write songs and record them as they're written. I have a producer [Oscar Charles] who loves what we're doing because we're writing a lot of them together anyway."
Leaving the Bro-Country Era
Before Rice had much success as an artist, he was part of one of country music's biggest songs of all time. The Florida native is one of the writers on Florida Georgia Line's "Cruise." The song, the duo's debut single, was a massive financial success for Rice, but creatively set him on a path he spent years trying to get off.
"I was like, 'Oh sh--. What is this?'"Rice recalls. "I knew nothing. Why would I not go down that road? I wasn't very good or experienced. And, I had all this success with 'Eyes On You.' So, it was like, 'I guess that's me. I have no idea who I am.' You got to take the wrong road to hit the right one."
Rice fortunately found the strength to leave that entire sub-genre of country music, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because it felt inauthentic to him.
"I don't care about if I'm the most popular artist in the world," Rice admits to Whiskey Riff. "I just want people to care about what I'm doing, and know that these songs were written really well, and say, 'I want to hear these songs in 50 years.' The stuff I was doing before, it's not going to stand the test of time,"
