Chase Rice Reveals How A Drive Through Colorado Turned Into Inspiration For His New Album, ‘Eldora’

Chase Rice turned a drive through the Colorado mountains into his most personal project yet. Today, the country star celebrates not only the release of his new album, Eldora, but also his 40th birthday.

With this being Rice’s second independent release after walking away from a major label deal, he got the chance to further explore his newfound creative freedom through deeply personal and honest stories. The unique title of Eldora marked the beginning of this bold new chapter. It came to Rice following his performance at the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheater in August of 2024 and ended up setting the tone for the remainder of the 12 tracks.

“We played Red Rocks the night before Oscar, my producer, and I were driving up to Rollinsville, and we passed a place called the Eldora Lodge, and that really started it,” Rice explained to Music Mayhem. “It was like, I don’t know what Eldora is, but we are writing about whoever that is, and it’s the city, but it’s really about a person called Eldora or just the town she’s from. It never really gets specific, but that’s the heart of the album, a story about this couple…. It’s a lot of story songs that are just very well written that we took our time to make sure that they were written right in that cabin.”

“Eldora” evolved into a story centered around a couple who breakup for an unknown reason. However, listeners who play close attention will catch the hint that lies in the line, “we were just two kids with too much life to live.” According to Rice, this was his clever way of insinuating that the lovebirds had an abortion and the upsetting emotions that came with this decision ended up tearing them apart.

“That’s a theme in life, especially when couples lose a child in general, they end up — the divorce rates are insanely high,” he explained. “So this couple wasn’t married, but they couldn’t get over the decision they made to have that abortion. And finally, he’s like, they know they’re still in love, so I’m coming back to you. I’m going to figure this out. I can’t get over the times that we had together, and we need to have more times together. So he goes back and gets her back.”

Much like “Eldora,” each of the tracks on this record showcase the new bounds of creativity that Rice has found as a songwriter since parting ways with his label Broken Bow Records/BBR Music Group. The majority of the tracks were penned amid the serene setting of a quiet cabin in the Colorado mountains, allowing him the space and comfort to craft stories that depict both highs and lows of life.

With this collection, it’s clear that Chase Rice has stepped away from the pressures of trying to chase mainstream radio. Being an independent artist gives him the chance to explore new avenues of his creativity. He began leaning in this new direction with 2023’s double album, I Hate Cowboys & All Dogs Go to Hell, which was followed by 2024’s Go Down Singin’.

“I was just chasing what was popular before the Cowboys record,” Rice admitted “I didn’t know what I was doing. Now I found that confidence to be like, ‘All right. Well, if I give up on mainstream and try to chase what’s popular, I’m okay with that. And if it never comes back, I’m cool with that. I want to make great records. I want to be proud of my music at the end of my life. And that’s where I’m at now.”

This time around, fans will experience something more “raw and real” than even the music on his last two albums.

“The last two albums… were us learning what this new era of my life is. With this one, we took it even further. [The last two] were with a full band, ‘Let’s record together.’ This one was, ‘Hey, what am I best at?’ And we discovered through the work tapes in that cabin, it’s really, really powerful when I sing into the phone with a guitar.”

Set up inside the cabin, Rice let his vocals do the talking, without the addition of heavy production and unnecessary elements. He delivered one takes with just him, the microphone and his guitar and then later included his band.

“That’s how raw this is,” Rice said of the project. “There’s no doctoring the vocals. There’s no doctoring. The guitars and what you hear is what you get, and it’s a very raw way to do it, but the mistakes are in there, and it’s a very human way to do it.”

His desire to stray from the mainstream path also influenced his selection of collaborations that appear on Eldora. The track list features “Two Tone Trippin’” with Wyatt McCubbin, “Country & Western” featuring Madeline Edwards, and “Tall Grass” with guest vocals by Kashus Culpepper and Elvie Shane. Rice noted how these collaborations further added to the entire theme of the album, which is “letting go” and “not overthinking anything.”

“That’s what I wanted on this record was other artists that I didn’t care how big their name was, I cared how much they wanted to do it. That was the biggest thing for me.  Kashus and Elvie were fired up to do it. That meant a lot to me that they wanted to work on my album,” he shared honestly. “The same goes for Madeline Edwards. She was really excited to do the song. We could have tried to get other bigger artists or whatever, more household names, but Madeline really loved it and she’s incredibly talented and she wanted to do it, and that meant a lot to me.”

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Rice expressed that above all else, he hopes that anyone who listens to Eldora gives it a fair chance by listening to it top to bottom, in the order it was written, and really feeling all the emotions within the lyrics. Approaching a project this way could be, as he admits, far more challenging than chasing hits like he has in the past, but the difference now is that he no longer cares about any of that.

“I’m at a place in my life. I’m going to do it, come hell or high water, and it’s going to be the road I’m going down.”

Fans can catch Chase Rice on his Go Down Singin’ International Tour, which began in March and is scheduled to continue through the fall.

Chase Rice Eldora Track List

1. Cowboy Goodbye

2. Tall Grass (feat. Kashus Culpepper & Elvie Shane)

3. Namin’ Horses

4. ELDORA

5. Two Tone Trippin’ (Feat. Wyatt McCubbin)

6. Mr. Coors

7. Circa 1943

8. Country & Western (Feat. Madeline Edwards)

9. Cottonmouth 

10. Good Side of Gettin’ Older

11. One Drink Long

12. Sunsettin’