Chayce Beckham Reveals Whiskey-Soaked Single 'Till The Day I Die' Became Tribute to Late Friend (Exclusive)
Country singer Chayce Beckham recently dropped a new single, "Till The Day I Die," a whiskey-soaked, outlaw-style tune all about staring death in the face and refusing to back down. However, the American Idol winner couldn't have known when he wrote it that it would late become a tribute to one of his closest friends. PopCulture.com recently had an opportunity to speak with Beckham, who opened up about how the song came together and then explained that it has since turned into a track he performs in honor of his late friend Lance.
Beckham explained that he wrote the song with Jordan Minton, Andy Albert, and Mark Trussel. While he had written with Albert quite a bit in the past, it was his first time meeting Minton and Trussel. "There's the questions where they all ask, 'Who do you like? What kind of music you listen to?' Everybody kind of getting to know each other... we started talking about guys that we like to listen to. I started talking about Blaze Foley and Towns Vanzant and Merle Haggard and just the old-school guys that I really love. And that was kind of the idea, what if we wrote this cool song about an outlaw song, but it doesn't have to be an outlaw song."
Beckham went on to share that the inspiration behind the lyrics for his new single came from some of country music's most well-known songs about worried mamas. "I came up with this idea for 'Till the Day I Die' of writing something that was like, 'This is how I am and you're not going to change me and you're not going to fix me.' I don't need to be fixed. I'm fine. Stop worrying about me and I'll worry about it when I get there. And my troubles are my troubles and I'm okay with that. Kind of the idea of, 'Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.' That's the first line is, 'well, s—. I guess Mama let me grow up to be a cowboy,' and then 'Mama tried,' and 'Well, no matter how hard she tried, she could've fixed this and this is not her fault, it's not my fault. It's just this is who I am and how I'm made.'"
Beckham knows that the rebellious nature of what he's singing might invoke uncomfortable feelings for some listeners, but that is precisely the point. "We're not trying to be like, 'Oh, I'm a cowboy' or 'I'm this or that.' It's just the idea of that reference and what that means. We wrote it toward... you might not like what the lyrics mean... You might not like the idea of what the person is trying to say. That's the whole concept of it is that you probably don't like that person and if you run into them, but you just don't know."
He added, "You don't know what they're doing. You don't know why they love these things or why they are the way they are, but that doesn't make you a bad person and that doesn't mean you're going to hell. So it was just a song about loving what you love and staying true to that and not letting nobody tell you anything different until you can't anymore. That's what made it really special when we wrote it and we left that day and we had this awesome demo of the song and we're all really excited about it."
Sadly, the high of finishing a new song didn't last long, as "about a week" later, Beckham got the tragic news that his best friend Lance had passed away in a motorcycle accident in Texas. "That was real heavy, still is real heavy for me to even think about just one of my very, very, very best friends, someone who's always been there for me and always believed in me and always stayed in touch with and never once ever thought of him not being here with us," he said, also noting that he had to hear the terrible news from Lance's sister. "I got that phone call and she told me that he was gone and I just lost it, man. I just had a hard time, had a real hard time with it."
Intending to drown his sorrows, Beckham took his girlfriend to a "little bar down the street" from his house and "drank up a storm," just trying to cope with the awful reality of Lance's death. "I was just kind of wallowing in my sorrow a little bit, me and my girlfriend and I probably drank about an entire bottle of whiskey." Interestingly, on that day, if by some divine circumstance, the community of country music fans showed him just the compassion he needed.
"I go to pay the tab and I know it's going to be expensive because I just drank practically a whole bottle there," he joked, then sharing that the bartender told him that the staff and owners appreciated him being a customer so they wanted to cover his drinks for the night. "He's like, 'Don't worry about your drinks, the tab's on us tonight.' I was like, 'Nah dude, let me pay the bill... I've been here 100 times.'" The bartender simply wouldn't take no for an answer, and that, Beckham lamented, "was the day that [Lance] died."
After taking "a couple weeks off of touring" to mourn his friend's death, Beckham says he went back out on the road and was greeted with a heartwarming surprise from fans. "I went and played a show and I played that song and I didn't tell anybody about it or what was going on in my life. I just played it. These people never heard the song before and they sang, by the time we got to the first chorus, they were singing the whole thing so loud, I didn't even have to sing it. It just sends chills down your back whenever something like that happens... I could feel like my buddy was there with me."
He went on to share that "slowly but surely" the new song became his tribute to Lance. "I tried to sit down and write the song for him specifically and it just felt weird. It didn't feel right and it almost felt like that all happened the way it happened," he said. "I felt like if I coulda gave him a bunch of songs, he'd have picked that one. He'd been like, 'Fine, no, that's the one I want.' I think that's kind of what he did. He made it to where I didn't have to put myself through it to write this thing about him. He was like, no, this one's perfect."
Beckham continued, "It almost seems like he handpicked that song for him and it's just become this awesome, big moment at every show where the audience sings that song louder than I do and I don't have to say anything, I don't have to ask them to. By the time we get to the chorus, they're just doing it. After two or three times I was just like, 'That song's dedicated to Lance, that's his song.'"
He acknowledges that "some people" find it "distasteful" that a song called "Till The Day I Die" is what Beckham dedicates to his "buddy who just died," but he noted that he and Lance both had similar senses of humor and he thinks his pal would get a kick out of it. "It's just one of those things where that song was already cool and special to me and then it turned into this whole other thing," he said. "And how important it is to me."
Beckham then admitted, "I really don't care what happens with it. I don't know if that sounds good or bad, but I don't care if it ever goes and gets played on a radio or if it goes number one or whatever, if it gets a million streams or no one listens to it at all. It makes me feel good to have it done and to have that out in the world and for him to have that one to sing along to every time that we go and hit a stage. It's a super cool feeling that I know that whenever you got that many people singing that you can hear."
He added, "It carries this energy... It's just a very special song where I feel there's life trapped inside of that song. I think you don't do that on purpose. It just happens. To me, it definitely happened with that song and it's one of those things where I couldn't be more grateful to be the guy that gets to sing it."
Beckham then offered some final thoughts on his friend, saying, "Lance was one of our favorites. You couldn't miss him. He was the life of the party. I mean, we all miss him a lot. Yeah, I mean I think that's one of the coolest things I could do for him is to get everybody in an audience to take a shot for him... to remember him through that song. I think it's a really, really cool thing, not only for me, but for his family and for all of us who were so close with him and who miss him so much."