Riley Smith is a familiar face for many country music fans, having starred in the Nashville TV show. The star has since gone on to release his own original music, including new single ‘Chocolate.’ Here, we chat to Riley about the single, his experience on Nashville and more.
How are you holding up, I guess with a baby it’s not quite as quiet as most people’s quarantines?
You know, yeah. It’s been the best to spend this time with the family, literally every waking minute she has her parents around her, which would have never been able to happen.
Life slows down but it can actually be something to be grateful for.
Yeah it’s been the best blessing to have this time with her, but we are obviously all getting antsy and getting ready to start life again.
Ready to start playing live music again rather than staring at a computer screen?
Yeah, hearing somebody sing along or clap with a song would be awesome. Right now, we’re doing these online shows where you don’t hear anything, you just get done and it’s silent.
That must be the weirdest thing, not being able to feed off the energy of a crowd. Has it been a good time to really dig into your music and songwriting?
Well I’ve done a lot of writing since we’ve been home, because you’re just locked down and there’s a lot of emotions going on in everybody’s mind. I took my first stab at a semi-political song the other day. I’ve got a verse and a chorus so far, I just had to get it off my chest. There were some things I wanted to write and they rhymed. It’s been awesome – a lot of time to just sit and play, obviously putting out Chocolate right now…
You managed to get that all filmed before lockdown started.
Yeah, we shot that a year ago, while we were in Chicago and I was doing a show called ‘Proving Innocent’ – this Fox show with Kelsey Grammer. When I was staying in Chicago and living there, I had this beautiful apartment on the Chicago river and it overlooked the city. I was like ‘I have to do a little writers’ retreat and this view is going to inspire music, I just know it.’ I brought up Kevin Leach, my producer from Nashville and this guy named Rick Ferrell, who is one of my favourite co-writers – He wrote Tim McGraw’s hit ‘Somethin’ Like That.’ Rick and I had wrote ‘Radio’ together and a couple of other songs that haven’t come out yet. So, they came up, I showed them the view and we turned my whole apartment into a recording studio. We locked ourselves in for three days straight and I kept thinking it was going to be the view that inspired the music and then one night we had gotten done writing and everyone fell asleep. I went on the balcony, just to get some fresh air and I get this whiff of this smell and I was like ‘god this place smells like chocolate’ and I love chocolate. For me, the subtext of this was this place is sweet, this is where I want to be. The next morning, we wake up and were like ‘ok, what do we want to write about today?’ and I said ‘man, I’ve got this note in my phone it’s super cool, all I wrote was – this place smells like chocolate.’ Rick grabbed the guitar and goes ‘and this city smells like chocolate..’ and we started writing off of that. He wrote the melody and the hook right on the spot. We decided what the story was going to be, to make this real. My fiancee and I have been together for six years and because of my job I have to travel all the time. Luckily, I get to take her with me, or she gets to come visit, so we’ve lived in Vancouver, Chicago, we’ve travelled all over the world and every place has been an amazing experience but there was something about this place that was just different. It was very easy to write itself.
The video also looked like so much fun to film.
We had a ball with it, this song inspired by Chicago, we had to shoot it in Chicago. We started casting immediately, I called my buddy Corbin, who’s a director from Milwaukee. We wrote a treatment, we got the cast together and then a lot of people in the TV show were cool enough to pitch in. The club scene – we put out a word in the city to a bunch of different outlets, I paid for the open bar…that was a mistake, I spent so much money on people’s alcohol that day.
Have you found you thrive having both creative outlets, acting and music?
Yeah because with acting, you’re reading somebody else’s lines and it’s a very different process, it’s a longer process. Music has always just been for me, I get to write the words, create the story. I take my guitar to my trailer and play there, anytime I’m on the road that’s what I do. Music is always going to be something that I have. I guess when I got on the show Nashville and then I got a small record deal and a manager and it became a small business, but it was a lot of pressure. I felt like I was starting to lose something about what I did it for in the first place, which was the freedom, it made me feel good, I got to do it when I wanted. That first EP I put out, which was very controlled in a certain way, we had publicists telling us how to pitch it and people telling me where I had to go play. It was fun, but when I got done with that little run and the EP was done and I got to go back to acting again, I realised that the next time I make music, I want to make it my own way.
It probably lost the element of fun..
I decided to stop worrying about making a cohesive album or putting out six songs at once, where people can only focus on one song at a time and the rest sort of go away. Each song is special to me, I spent a lot of time, energy and money on each song, so I don’t want to throw them away. That’s why I thought, put them out one at a time, that way we can focus on each one.
Do you feel like you learned a lot and your songwriting changed a lot from being in Nashville?
It was bootcamp for me. I was an amateur part-time musician in LA, then when I got to Nashville, I literally got straight off the plane and went to a music studio and cut my first song. I’m cutting with some of the biggest producers and it just happened so fast. My first song was a duet with Connie Britton, I was playing the Grand Ole Opry. Luckily, I was so new to the city that I didn’t realise how important that was, I wasn’t as nervous as I should have been. It all happened so fast, that’s what I wasn’t prepared for. You get the song, you have to learn it, along with your lines for the show, then you go in and cut it and you’re expected to sing it great. Then you go to set and you act, then you usually have to go to a rehearsal to choreograph for the song on the show, then you’ll do that. Any day I wasn’t working, I was setting up my own songwriting sessions with writers in town.
Keeping yourself busy…
And I managed to fit in a lot of drinking too. I had so much fun, Nashville will always be one of my top three projects.
Was that a tipping point for you wanting to put out more music?
It gave me the drive, after I got done with that run in Nashville, I was all in. I wanted to move to Nashville. It made it a real thing – people started calling me a musician and a singer. I was making money and we were travelling and playing gigs, it was just a lot of work, so you can’t keep that up and be on a TV show.
Final Few
If a biopic was made about your life, what would be the opening track? Life is a Highway (laughs)
Would you rather give up songwriting or performing? Songwriting.
Which record would you bring to a desert island? Anything by John Mayer.
Complete the sentence…
Music is… love.
Country music is… fire.
Riley Smith is… water. (laughs)
