Riley Green On Ella Langley: How They Met
Riley Green and Ella Langley won their first CMA Award on Wednesday night (11/20) for Musical Event of the Year for their collaboration on “You Look Like You Love Me.” They also performed the song on the show.
Riley recently talked about how he came to know Ella and got to work with her on the song. He told us, “Yeah, I’ve been a big fan of Ella Langley for a long time. We met through a mutual friend, and I was kinda in as soon as I heard her voice and her twang and how country she sounded, and also that she loved what I would call traditional country music.”
Green added, “And then also, she’s from Alabama, so I kinda was pullin’ for her anyway. So, I was very fortunate to get her on tour. And ‘You Look Like You Love Me’ happened, which is something I don’t think any of us had any idea about. I heard the song through our mutual friend, and Ella played it for me some, and I wrote a verse for it, and it just became this giant hit song.”
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Riley spent the summer of 2023 on one of country music’s biggest tours with Luke Combs, who sold out multiple nights of stadiums nationwide.
I talked with Green recently, and he told me how the 2023 Combs tour helped him out. He said, “I certainly learned a lot. It’s a different show. You know, I think I am a lot more drawn to the smaller acoustic venues and the more intimate setting. It’s completely different, so there is a lot I had to learn to fill up a big stage like that and to appeal to fifty-thousand people.”
He continued, “I definitely learned a lot about a live show, and it really put me in front of a lot of new potential fans. It was a great opportunity. I think me and Luke have a lot of the same fans. We have some similarities in music and songwriting, so it was cool to have that opportunity, and to see fifty-something thousand people singing ‘I Wish Grandpas Never Died’ back to me every weekend is pretty motivating.”
Green’s recent album has a song with Luke called “Different Round Here.” He told me how it came about, “I wish I had a really cool story about it; I just texted him and said, ‘You want to be a part of this song?’ It was always a really big song for me, and the fans have always screamed that song to me at shows when I play it. I told him I thought it might be the next single, and fortunately for me, he wanted to be a part of it.”
Riley concluded, “It worked out great, and the timing was great with the tour, and it’s fun to see it going up the charts now.”
