Chayce Beckham Says Debut Album ‘Bad For Me’ Represents ‘Different Phases’ of His Life (Exclusive)

It’s been three years since Chayce Beckham was crowned winner of American Idol Season 19. The life-changing experience was only the beginning, however, and now the singer has released his very first album, Bad For Me. The project is undoubtedly one of the strongest debut albums for an American Idol alumni and it’s already a contender to top year-end lists. 

The biggest part of the allure of Bad For Me is Beckham’s authenticity, which bleeds through each one of the album’s 13 tracks. Speaking to PopCulture.com about crafting the new record, Beckham said, “It’s been wild just putting this thing together and getting to the point where we’re mixing it and mastering it and even naming it.” He then confessed, “I had no idea what I was going to call this record throughout the whole process. It’s just been so cool watching it come to life from songs that are just in a notebook and thoughts that are just in someone’s head to this whole big picture.”

“I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time, and now that I’m here, I don’t know what to do,” Beckham later added. “You think that you’d prepare for it. Even if I were to win an award or anything, I don’t know what I would say. You want to do it your whole life, but then I’m not the type of person to sit down and be like, ‘Oh, I should write something to say.’ I think I’d get up there and just not know what to do, even though I worked my whole life just to get to that one place. 

“That’s kind of where I’m at right now,” he continued. “It’s just like all these amazing things are happening and it just feels so good to be here in this place in my life and to be living this dream and getting to sing the songs that I want and sing the songs that I love, and hopefully those are the ones that connect with people and we get to just keep on doing this over and over and over again.”

While Beckham’s country music career kicked into high gear in 2021 when he won , he’s very candid about still learning new things every day. “A lot of this stuff I do for my first time,” he told us. “I think people don’t realize that either. I’ve never done any of this stuff before. I’m just figuring it out, fake it until you make it.”

One thing he had to do for the first time was sequencing, which is when an artist decides how their album’s tracklist will be and where each song will go. “I just sat and listened to it a ton and a ton and a ton, and I’d stop and then go pick the next one and try to get them as fast as I could so I could try to get the feeling of the record,” Beckham said. “Ultimately, I thought that I had captured a sequence that pulled you in and kept you there all the way till the end, and I know it did for me. I just hope it works on other people.”

“It’s definitely on the list to where it tells a story and picking these songs,” he added, then went on to reveal, “we had 40 plus songs to pick from that I had been working on over the last three years, and that’s 40 songs out of hundreds of songs, that we’ve gone through and just a ton of music. So getting it down to just 12 songs that we were going to go in and cut was really hard.”

“What that said to me was that we genuinely had the best of the best stuff that I could come up with and to put onto a record,” Beckham continued. “I do think there’s a few that we missed, that we didn’t get on there, but it’s not like any of the songs on the record aren’t just as good as those songs. So if we were able to, I think I would’ve made a 20-song-long record or something like that. I wanted people to be able to sit down and finish it within the hour, so we stuck with something that was a little more consumable.”

To summarize the album, Beckham explained, “I think it’s not me now. It’s definitely me in a lot of different phases of the last few years. Even up to before all of this, I wrote one of the songs on the record, ‘Drink You Off My Mind,’ when I was still working at United Rentals, and that’s literally what that song’s talking about is driving up and down the highway each day to and from where I was working and what I was going through. I came home from work one day and wrote that song and no one’s really heard it.”

“Some of those versions of myself are pretty old and I’m too far away from that, but still it’s part of my story and who I am,” he concluded. “So it definitely represents me from before the success that I’ve found all the way up until this moment right now.”

Above is the full Bad For Me album stream on Spotify, or fans can click here to find it at their preferred streaming service. Click here for a full list of Beckham’s dates — including his current headlining ‘Bad For Me’ tour. Keep it locked to PopCulture.com for more of out conversation with Beckham, as well as more great country music interviews and exclusives!