Chase Rice Admits He’s Not a Very Good Boyfriend: ‘I’m Learning Though’
Chase Rice's new song "If I Were Rock & Roll" is a lost-love song that finds the singer regretting how a relationship ended.
"If I weren't a fool / Girl, I'd still be with you," he sings to close the chorus.
Talking to Taste of Country Nights, Rice — who earlier this year was rumored to be dating Kristin Cavallari — made it clear the song is biographical. This first song from his next studio album is one he wrote alone, leaving no one else to pin the most personal lyrics on. It all started with his frustration with social media boiling over, however. Well, that and Bruce Springsteen.
ToC Nights: What is Chase Rice like in a relationship? Are you the first one to say 'I love you' normally?
Chase Rice: (laughs) No, it takes me a good five to eight years to say that. I've got so many screwed up things in my life, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. And I don’t know what’s wrong with the girls that date me … why would you put yourself through that?
I don't tend to get into the whole, "We've been seeing each other a couple months, why don't we make this official?" Literally my last three have been, "We’ve been seeing each other for two years now, I guess we kind of are together, aren’t we?" That's more of what it's like for me, which is really, really weird and I understand that, but that's just how it is.
Do you send flowers?
I'll send flowers if I need to send flowers (laughs). I'm not a big, 'Here's flowers just because!' guy. I'm a big flowers-because-I'm-sorry-for-that guy.
Yeah, I'm not the best. I'm learning though. I'm getting better in my years. I'll get there one day. I'm just not there yet.
This is the first song you've worked on with (producer) Jay Joyce (Eric Church, Little Big Town, Miranda Lambert). What encouraged you to completely switch things up for "If I Were Rock & Roll"?
Really just taking time off. Just taking time off last year was huge for me. It reminded me why I do music in the first place. I picked up a guitar one night and I got off of social media. Social media to me is a huge, huge problem for our world right now. I got off it. I was like, "I don't have to participate in this s--t."
I got off it that night and I had nothing to do, so I ended up turning on the Letter to You documentary that Bruce Springsteen put out last year. A song called "If I Was the Priest." My first thought was, "OK, if I were Jesus" ... And that's where I went with it. I was like, "What if I were all these things ... that are huge influences in my life. From my grandpa, to Johnny Cash to Jesus, to my buddy who was on the Bin Laden raid that told me the story about that — that's the American flag part, that's pressed on his chest there at the beginning. These are all the best things in my life. We get to the end of the chorus and it's like, "If weren't a fool then I'd still be with you." That's the one thing that I can't figure out.
Did Jay push you harder or encourage you to do something you might not have thought of otherwise?
Oh yeah. First and foremost, I don't bring him anything that's produced. It's all just me singing in my phone. That's all he wants to hear.
I'm playing the guitar part on the record because he's like, "That's your part, you need to play it." The solo, he pushed for that ... to me it sounds like an old (Rolling Stones) solo. He's just unbelievable. He's a different mind. He elevates a song. He can take a song that's not good and make it good, and he can take songs that are good and make them great.