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Chase Rice dropped the perfect Western-inspired music video to bring life to his outlaw anthem, “Way Down Yonder,” one of his latest songs to mark the beginning of his new era.
Rice wrote the track with Hunter Phelps, John Byron, Blake Pendergrass and Corey Crowder during a writing retreat in Florida, according to a press release on Friday (October 14). Rice recorded his album, including “Way Down Yonder,” during a two-week period at his Nashville-area farm with a band and producer Oscar Charles.
“When we wrote this song, I had the mountains of North Carolina where I grew up in mind; all the moonshining history there in the Appalachians,” Rice recalled in a statement when his video premiered. “Then all of a sudden during the recording process, Rob McNelley started playing this crazy carnival sound on the acoustic… and it got Western quick. That turned it from a song I didn’t think was even going to make the cut for this next album into one of my favorite songs on the project.”
“Way down yonder where the outlaws wander/ You can feel that thunder in your bones/ Rippin’ hot rod runners under moonlight cover/ Just some back glass gunners on the road/ Where you buy your bud with your moonshine money/ Make your love where the bees make honey/ When the cut’s where you’re born and raised/ Man it’s in your blood, we were born this way down yonder.”
Rice is gearing up to release his next album, which he previously told iHeartRadio is “much more vulnerable than any other music I've made.” Rice also said that he considers it to be “a timeless album. It's something you're gonna be able to listen to in, you know, 15, 20 years, and it still sounds really, really awesome. …It really won't age any way, but great.”
The singer-songwriter kicked off his new era with “Key West & Colorado,” the song inspired by Rice’s real-life road trip that tells the “story about a man trying to figure his life out – trying to figure out his past, trying to figure out his satiation with the breakup that he had or the woman that was in his life that he lost – and the trip that he took to help him along that journey.”