Lucas: Eyes On Chase Rice

By Adam Lucas

Like most former football players of a certain success level, Chase Rice was pondering recently what might have been if he could have stayed healthy and stuck with football.

"I wonder if I could have played in the NFL," the former Tar Heel linebacker told a friend.

"What were you doing in 2015?" he was asked.

"Well, I was on tour with Kenny Chesney," he replied.

"And where did you play?" came the response.

"We played Soldier Field, and Lucas Oil Stadium, and Heinz Field, and Lincoln Financial Field…" Rice remembered.

The friend just gave him a look. Rice was checking off multiple NFL stadiums, without having to worry about concussions or injuries or being cut. That's the kind of post-college career it's been for the Asheville native, who was in Greensboro and Wilmington this weekend for the latest stops on his AM/PM Tour.

Rice's post-career path has not been linear but has always been interesting. He won a couple of NASCAR championships as part of Jimmie Johnson's pit crew and appeared on the hit television show "Survivor," but always felt a pull back to music. The seed for that career was planted in Granville Towers, when teammate Ben Lemming showed him a couple of chords on the guitar.

Soon, Rice was writing songs, especially after the untimely death of his father before his senior season at Carolina. Even while his post-UNC path took him to NASCAR and "Survivor," he still felt the pull to music. Not long after committing to it full-time and moving to Nashville, he helped write Florida-Georgia Line's "Cruise," one of the most downloaded songs in history.

The success of that song helped facilitate his transition to successful artist, but it's his songwriting talent that has kept him there for three albums and multiple tours. His song "Eyes On You"—which he also co-wrote—was the number-one song in the country for two weeks this summer, and "Lonely If You Are" (another song he co-wrote) is now climbing the charts. Rice estimates he'll play around 130 shows this calendar year, a grueling travel schedule that usually means he's not entirely sure what town he's in until he steps off the bus.

Life on that bus isn't a complete hardship, of course. A personal trainer travels with him, and the bus has a pair of televisions that on this night are tuned to the major league baseball playoffs and college football. Earlier in the day, he spent some time on the bus writing new songs. If he likes it, that material might make its way to Instagram, where he is about to surpass a million followers. The days of holding new songs until an official album debut are over, at least for Rice, who has no problem releasing early samples to stay connected with fans.

Rice plays "Cruise" as a standard part of his shows, and by now, even casual supporters are aware he helped write it. But there's another part of his background that comes through strongly even on stage—his Tar Heel pedigree. He drinks from a He's Not Here cup as he progresses through a 15-song setlist, and he launches into a discussion of the relative merits of Carolina and NC State when a fan in the crowd throws up the Wolfpack's wolf hand signal.

The best evidence of that love for the Tar Heel state is on "Carolina Can," the song Rice describes as, "the one song I would sing before I die." That song has become a regular feature of the Kenan Stadium pregame playlist for Tar Heel football home games.

"North Carolina is in my blood and it's who I am," he tells the crowd in Greensboro. Like the rest of his career—which has been marked by multiple occasions when he diverted from the typical country path—there isn't much pretense about Rice's beliefs. He leaves the crowd in Greensboro with two parting words from the stage:

"Go Heels!"

Subscribe to the Carolina Insider podcast for an in-depth interview with Rice on Tuesday's episode.

University of North Carolina Athletics

Related News

Related Videos