“You like that?” he asks, cracking the biggest smile I’ve seen from him all day. He speeds through his bison pen in a four-seat Can-Am, daring his 1,800-pound pets to catch up. The sun is setting behind the bison, creating a cloud of shining gold dust as they kick up the ground beneath them.
“There’s just something about the West,” Rice muses, as the Can-Am slows and the thundering bison quiet down. “I’ve just loved looking at buffalo, and I’ve always loved the Western life. So, I brought a little of that here.”
“Here” refers to Twin Eagles Creek Farm, located about half an hour south of Nashville. Rice estimates he spends barely four months a year here. The rest of the time, he’s either on tour or traveling across Montana in a Capri truck camper with his black Lab, Jack, hunting ducks and elk in the breathtaking solitude of the American West.
It’s a significant departure from the “Ignite the Night” ethos that Rice was known for as a pioneer of pop country. The man who wrote the songs “Cruise” and “Eyes on You” is swapping debauchery for a duck blind, and his new lifestyle is reflected in his latest album, ELDORA.
While it might not be as commercially popular as his earlier work, this music fits this version of Chase Rice just fine.
The Hunting Roots of Chase Rice
Rice is no newcomer to the hunting game. In fact, he has been hunting since his childhood in North Carolina.
“My brother and I would go shoot doves off the power lines, which is very illegal,” he says. “Then, when I got to be like 11, my dad would take us hunting to keep us out of trouble. We’d deer hunt on the back side of the Biltmore property, and I just fell in love with it.”
Hunting took a backseat to football when Rice arrived at the University of North Carolina, where he played linebacker from 2005 to 2008. It disappeared even further into the rear-view mirror when Rice worked on a NASCAR pit crew for two years after college. It was pushed aside as a pleasant childhood memory when his music career took off, and Rice became immersed in the life of a young country music star.
“From 2010 to 2015, I didn’t hunt at all, just partied my ass off,” he muses while looking out from Twin Eagles’ stately front porch. “Then in 2015, my brother called me and asked if I wanted to go out west to Montana and kill elk with a bow. And I’m like, ‘God, that sounds crazy. OK, I’m in.’”
The hunt brought Rice right back into it, and although it took three years before he shot his first bull with a bow, the experience started a slow change in his life. Rice began spending more time out west, and in 2021, he bought an Airstream trailer so he could go wherever the prairie wind led him. Last year, he purchased his Capri truck camper, which has become his home for nearly four months each year.
Jack The Dog And Duck Hunting
The camper wasn’t the only thing that got Rice back into the outdoors. In 2020, he adopted Jack, who has unquestionably become the lifelong bachelor’s best friend.
“I’d never had a dog in my life,” Rice says, relaxing on his large white couch in the center of his large, white living room decorated with elk heads and a big portrait of Ronald Reagan. “My parents always said, ‘No dogs, they get hair all over the house.’”
Jack attempts to jump up on the couch to join him, and it’s the only time all day Rice shoos him off. “Can’t have black hair on the white couch,” he says.
“I’d duck hunted maybe once a year for my whole life, and it was fun, but I’d never really gotten into it,” he continues. “And I always wanted a dog, because I knew if I got a dog I’d be diving headfirst into duck hunting.”
A turkey hunt with Chad Belding in 2019 led Rice to a Black Lab breeder in Georgia, who was having a litter of puppies with an elite bird dog named Flex.
“I couldn’t make it down there, so he sent me some pictures,” he says, picking up his phone. “Look, this first one he sends, this dog looks like an assassin, like he’s ready to duck hunt tomorrow. Then…” Rice scrolls through his photos to a dopey-looking puppy with a red ribbon on, who looks like he’d just as soon be chasing balloon animals as retrieving birds.
“There’s Jack,” he says with the pride of a mother showing her son’s Naval Academy photo. “Just sitting there looking fat. He’s an ad for dog food. And I said, ‘Gimme that, I want the fat one.’”
The “Fat One” has developed into an elite hunting dog, and the reason Chase Rice spends his entire winter in duck blinds.
“I can be in a blind and not have a gun, not shoot a single bird, and I don’t give a shit. Cause when everybody’s done killing birds, that’s when my job begins, working with the dog,” Rice says from under a hat that says, “Duck Hunter.” The bill’s underside is inscribed with the date he first wore it and the number of birds he killed that day.
“I love killing birds,” he adds, just so we’re clear. “I’ve got birds all over this house now, but every duck in this house is something Jack retrieved.”
An Outdoorsman’s Ultimate Bachelor Pad
Jack’s retrieves are just part of the décor in the main house at Twin Eagles, a motif best described as “Hunter’s Bachelor Pad.” Animal heads cover most of his two-story walls, with deer and elk skins spread over the floors. It’s not exactly haphazard, but it looks like it. Rice said, “You know what would be cool up there? Another elk.”
Like any bachelor, he has his friends’ birth announcements, Christmas cards and wedding invitations stuck to the side of his refrigerator. The fridge doesn’t have much in it other than a couple of containers of leftover takeout and half-used condiments. On his kitchen island, a cookbook is open to a simple recipe for elk burgers.
“I got a freezer full of elk meat, you can have some if you want,” he says. “I eat a lot of elk meat; elk spaghetti is the number one thing. I just pour vodka sauce in there, put it on noodles and serve it up. It’s meat-heavy for protein.”
Rice is still lean and muscular, not quite linebacker-sized but big enough people probably don’t start fights with him. Health, or at least living a healthier life, has been a priority for him in the latter half of his 30s. And although you can find a bottle of small-batch or custom-blended bourbon on half the shelves in his house, living healthier has meant cutting back on booze.
How The Party Scene Has Changed For Chase Rice
“Partying was all I used to care about,” Rice says, looking back on his early days of fame with a mix of nostalgia and regret that bachelors often feel in middle age. “I used to drink to disappear, or pick up girls, and that was all that mattered.”
Then a few years ago, his friend Brian Carpenter, who runs the Refuge men’s retreat, invited Rice to do 75 Hard: a trending wellness challenge that, among other things, involves 75 days of sobriety.
“He could tell I was drinking too much and partying too hard,” Rice says. “It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary (in country music), but I can go pretty dark. So, he said, ‘Hey man, let’s do 75 Hard.’ I was scared to start. But I was also like, if I’m this scared to do it, I gotta do it.”
During those 75 days, Rice navigated the Kentucky Derby and a concert tour of Hawaiian military bases without consuming a single drink. He took up film photography and began to realize the value in having sober conversations, weeding out people who were a waste of his time.
“There’s something different about you when you’re not drinking; you have a different vibe,” he says. “The people you meet are very different when you’re sober. Interesting. And they’re much more worth your time.”
Not that Rice is pounding the drum for sobriety. He’ll still go out and drink with his hunting buddies when they don’t have to be up early the next day. But it’s a different kind of celebration now, one done out of joy rather than pain.
“I’m not drinking to escape anymore. I’m drinking ’cause I’m having a good time with my friends,” he says. “Instead of going to the bar, I’m going out to Montana and traveling around and seeing the whole freaking northwest or duck hunting. You miss the party sometimes for sure. But the party’s just changed.”
Chase Rice’s New ELDORA Album
Rice’s new music reflects the life of a man more concerned with hunting waterfowl than women. ELDORA, written from a cabin in Colorado, and recorded in Nashville largely in single takes is how Chase got back to what he calls “a complete surrender to the music.”
H&B audience members got a sneak listen well before the album’s September 2025 release, when Rice starred in the H&B original video series called The Chase. His fireside acoustic renditions were epic!
ELDORA is grittier, more stripped down and personal than his pop hits of the old days. The influences of John Prine—whose vinyls play on vintage phonographs serving as the soundtrack to life at Twin Eagles Creek Farm—are obvious.
“If you prefer what I wrote 10 years ago, that’s cool. Go listen to it. You’re not gonna get that from me again,” he says. “Am I never gonna have another hit? The way music is now, probably not. But I don’t care because the music I’m making is great.
"There’s a line from The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life that says, ‘I don’t know where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there.’ And I have no idea where my music is gonna lead now, but I know making great songs is all that matters for me.”
For more on Chase Rice including music, tour dates, and more, visit Chase Rice Official.
This content originally appeared in the November-December 2025 print edition of Hook & Barrel magazine.
