Rue dies and Katniss realizes just how much she hates the Capitol for doing this to Rue, for doing this to all of the tributes.
Katniss sings a lullaby from her district, and when she's finished, the mockingjays pick up her song. Rue makes Katniss promise that she'll win for both of them, and then asks Katniss to sing her a song. And you can hear it in my voice.With a single arrow, Katniss kills the boy from District 1, who speared Rue, and takes Rue's hand. It doesn't do anything for me.' And this record, there's not one song I don't believe in. And some stuff, I'm like, 'Okay, I believe that song.' Some stuff I'm like, 'Okay, it's a hit, but eh. "Just messing around with my buddies, playing old songs. "I've been listening to a lot of old stuff this week," he adds after a pause. And then taking that and having no shame about it, just taking it to a 's like, 'I believe it.' Chasing addictions, facing deaths - you know, losing my dad when I was 22 rocked my world, more than I ever thought. "I don't know if we ever really figure it out, but we at least head in that direction. We all have to figure out who we are," he admits. Once he started enjoying listening to his own record, he knew he'd hit his stride. But the singer says that honing in on his true self meant finding music that he doesn't get sick of. The goal was to make "the most Chase Rice album possible." Rice, like anybody else, is a multi-dimensional person, so nailing down the kind of music that is truest to his artistic identity is a challenge, and a moving target. We're gonna do a whole album together.' I had no idea if it was gonna work. "I loved Boy Named Banjo's Circles EP, so I I knew he could do something along the lines of what I wanted to do," the singer continues. But for a whole album, to really dive in, I needed someone who was all in - and Oscar was that."Ĭharles is known for his work producing acts including Elvie Shane and Boy Named Banjo, and his previous work gave Rice the confidence that Charles was the right person to help him fulfill his musical vision. "I'd always wondered what it would be like, and now I know.
"I just straight told them, 'Y'all, I gotta chase this down,'" Rice remembers. But when the call came and he learned he was getting the opportunity to work with Joyce, who's known for his work with everyone from Eric Church and Miranda Lambert to Cage the Elephant and Coheed and Cambria, he couldn't pass it up. He also switched up his production team: The singer made his past records with legendary Nashville producer Jay Joyce, but this time around, he took a gamble, committing to making a whole album with a producer he hadn't worked with much before, Oscar Charles.Ĭharles - who was the mastermind behind Rice's home studio, and transformed his guitar-led first recordings into a fleshed-out, still real and raw-sounding finished product - was actually someone that the singer intended to work with years ago. Rice set up a home studio in his living room, complete with an upright piano, drums and percussion, guitars, bass and keyboards. "Because you can take an average song, produce it, pop it up while you're writing it, and you think it's better than it really is," he points out. Why did I get away from that?" he wonders. The songs on his next album were primarily written on acoustic guitar, he explains, in a move back toward the way he used to write songs when he was first getting started as an artist. In the past, Rice used click tracks and pre-programmed musical beds this time around, he opted to write and record his material using only real instruments. "Key West & Colorado" marks a new musical direction, too, and heralds a major stylistic shift that'll be more apparent as he heads into his next album cycle. "That's what this song is about for me, is going on a journey like that to figure my own s-t out," he concludes.
The song's lyrics tell a story of moving through a breakup by physically traveling from place to place, and Rice says that as an avid traveler, he feels a profound connection to the idea of getting from one emotional space to another via physical travel. "That was an accident, because we were supposed to go from Key West to Nashville, but Nashville was snowed in.so it was like, 'Well, let's just go to Denver! Go to REI and get some stuff, snowboard. I did it and then I posted it to Instagram: Key West and Colorado," he continues. Kelley made a suggestion about a direction for the track, but Rice re-steered the writing session towards another interpretation - one closer to his life, and the experiences he'd been going through when he made that Instagram post. "Key West & Colorado" had been the caption of an Instagram post he'd previously made, and when BK saw it on his feed, he kept the title saved as a potential song idea. Even though it was Kelley who brought the title to the group, Rice was - unwittingly - the one who came up with it.