INTERVIEW: Riley Green Joins Thomas Rhett

You know, in school, I wasn’t a big… I wasn’t a big music guy. I would never really consider myself a musician. I played three sports. I did construction work in the summer with my dad. And my musical influences, and I guess passion for it, kind of came from my granddaddy, Buford. He was a big country music fan. I wrote a song about him, I played at his funeral in 2010. He wasn’t good. He didn’t play guitar, but he had one and we both liked it so much, we’d just sit around and try to play it. It led to him calling up some buddies that played and we started a little music hall at my grandparents’ house. And that was just kind of a little side project and they never had any goals or aspirations of being in music, but just… He enjoyed it, so that’s what we did.

So I walked on at Jacksonville State, I was initially a walk on. The college, like going to class part, was not for me. I struggled there. My mom would say I could get up at four o’clock in the morning and go walk through a swamp and try to kill a duck but I couldn’t make it to a 9:45 class. What was really been beneficial for me in the sense of my music was I met all those people in this college town. That’s when I started playing the little music was in college, on weekends I go play in bars. People came to the shows not because I was all that good, they just knew that was where the party was at in a small town like that. The transition from football, the lack of that career going anywhere kind of started me playing these hole in the wall bars every weekend.

So I get out of college, and I had business cards with my phone number on it. I was passing out to people that own bars and didn’t have anybody working for me. It was just word of mouth. I started getting calls to go play bars, and it started to gradually get bigger, Northeast Alabama slipping into Georgia every once in a while. I met up one of my old ball coaches from Jacksonville. The head coach got fired and he moved into an apartment I was living in and he was a big Jamey [Johnson] fan and just a big fan of the same country music that I liked. Jamey being from Alabama and him seeing that, how it happened, man, you should try to get his gig in Nashville. We went and played in Tootsies one time and I’ll never forget. This was early on. This was 2014 or ’15. I rode up first time ever being in Nashville, and there was a line of people to the door waiting to play. It was an open mic and everybody that played after me was 10 times better than me and it was the most miserable thing. I was like, “Man, I’m never coming back up here.” I know people don’t like me back home so it really made me concentrate on just kind of hammering out those honky-tonk bars everywhere somebody wanted to see me and controlling what I could control. And that was getting better, trying to write a little bit and just put on a good show. Just go to a coffee shop and make people stop and sit down to drink and look up. That was my goal, trying to figure out how to do that.

I had some success with songs like “Georgia Time” and some of that stuff that even still is big songs for me, but I started coming to Nashville and writing. That was where me and Erik Dylan sat down and wrote “There Was This Girl.” It was the two of us. I think it was the second song we’d ever written together. I think I went and cut it to put on another EP. I was going to release it myself. Next thing you know, a record label started calling.

That one will never get old. I mean, people always say when you have a hit, “Well get used to playing that one. You’re going to be playing it forever.” But it doesn’t. And probably, more than anything, because I saw firsthand how that song affects people. And that’s what’s awesome about writing songs in general. But I was just thinking about… My granddaddy Buford, like I said, was just such a big influence on me. I spent time with both of them growing up, as much as my parents. He passed away early, before any type of success in music for me. So I just pictured, after traveling and seeing the things that I’d seen over a couple years of having a record deal, what it’d be like, him asking about it. Basically pictured what that conversation would be like. I start thinking about some of the things that he taught me growing up and the values that my granddaddies taught me. And there are places that some of that stuff’s lacking. What’s been really cool about that to me too, is I’ve heard people come up… Like a guy came to me after a show or meet and greet and said, it’s an old man, he said, “I never knew my grandparents, but I’m a grandfather.” And he loved the song for that reason. And I mean, that’s something. There’s something about it people relate to in a million different ways.

THOMAS: I want to say it was one or two o’clock in the morning, we were sitting on the couch, and we had started this song that actually ended up on your current record. But I also remember playing you a song that I was like, “Man, would you want a feature on this?” I remember at the time you were to like, “Yeah, I like the song. It’s cool.” Then I don’t think anything ever happened about it. Fast forward six months later, I texted you the song again and I said, “Hey, I would love for you to feature on this thing.” You said, “You know what, man? I love this song. You tell me when to come sing on it.” You came in, took a good song, and made it great.

RILEY: You’re probably like me, getting a lot of songs and stuff sent to you, and you hear a lot of songs. Finding out if it’s you, and if it fits, and everything. I just remember hearing this one. First off, it sounds like a hit. It’s a fun song. To be honest with you, after singing on it, it was great, man. Like I said, it’s been something I’ve been really excited about, everybody hearing it, to play it for everybody.