Chayce Beckham recently released his newest single, “This Ol’ Rodeo,” which he co-wrote with fellow country music troubadour Stephen Wilson Jr. and which he admits sounds a little different from some of his other music. Leaning more to the Western end of country music, the upbeat song sounds as if it’s powdered with the dust of a Texas barn dance. The arrangement is nostalgic honky tonk — full of classic heartland fiddle and steel guitar — while Beckham sings about “dancin’ with the bulls” in his unique brand of cowboy vulnerability.
PopCulture.com had an opportunity to speak with the American Idol winner about his new tune, and he shared that the traditional tone of “This Ol’ Rodeo” was quite intentional. “That was something that I was trying to make that was not pop-country, if that makes sense,” he explained. “I don’t feel like I’m the artist to sing pop-country songs, and I have definitely had some that are more in that vein. I think that these last couple songs like ‘Whiskey on the Wall,’ ‘This Ol’ Rodeo’ showed a side of me that I’ve been kind of trying to show and just haven’t had the opportunity to yet.”
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Beckham went on to share that his bandmates and fans are big fans of the track as well. “I feel like that song in particular is one that we love to play live. It’s a very fun performance song,” he said. “Anytime we’re in a honky tonk or we’re in a bar, we play that, all the cowboys go nuts. It’s just a fun song to have in there and it also comes from a true place.”
Sharing some backstory on how he came to conceive “This Ol’ Rodeo,” Beckham said, “A good friend of mine [was a] rodeo cowboy growing up, bulldogger, a steer wrestler, and it was influenced by his love and passion for rodeo and how he would lose money and break a bone or get hurt or tear something and his horse would get hurt or you name it, and he’d still go back and back and get up and get back on his horse and keep going and keep going. It was just the idea of you got to be kind of crazy to love something that much.”
“I wrote the song with my friend Stephen Wilson Jr.,” he continued. “Me and Stephen kind of got to talking about that and how music and touring and whenever you love something so much, that it kind of just takes away from the rest of your life and that’s all that you live for, that’s behind the song. It’s just loving something that is kind of hard to hold onto, if that makes sense.”
“It’s about finding a woman that can deal with your ass and always being on the road and part of a traveling circus,” Beckham added. “It’s like, ‘You got to be kind of crazy if you want to love me.’ That’s the essence of the song where it comes from. I feel like it is supposed to sound a little gritty, a little dirty, and I love songs that sound like that. I’m really proud of that one.”
