Riley Green has never liked the sound of his own voice, and he said so plainly on the Zach Sang Show.
“It took a long time for me to get where I would sing in front of anybody. I never liked my voice, never thought I was very musically talented,” he said.
He said that feeling about his own voice is what pushed him down a different road with his career.
He even joked about the interview he was giving. “…I probably won’t listen to this ’cause I can’t stand to hear myself talk either.”
That is a rare confession from a man whose latest album opened in the top 10.
Riley Green Says Writing Songs Nobody Else Could Write Set Him Apart
There was a stage in his family, though. His granddaddy Buford founded the Golden Saw Music Hall in rural Alabama, a “miniature Grand Ole Opry” in Green’s great-grandparents’ home that is still active, and Buford would pay his grandson $15 to $20 to get up on stage.
“I can remember playing cover shows for years and years and years, and there were so many people that were better than me. And so when I started writing, I thought, well I can set myself apart from somebody because I’m the only person to write that particular song, or that line, or that experience,” he said.
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He said writing from where he grew up, how he was raised and what he has lived through is about the only way he can set himself apart, and that “…songwriting for me was what opened the door to having a career.”
Green first went to Nashville in 2017 hoping for a publishing deal, and he was building houses before he signed his record deal in 2018. He told Holler that radio was never a goal, and he put the rest plainly. “The only thing I could do to stand out was to write. Nobody else could write the songs that I wrote.”
His No. 3 Album That’s Just Me Is Built Mostly on Songs He Wrote
His models are the old storytellers. He said Merle Haggard and George Jones were just telling a story, without a lot of complicated stuff in there, and that is what he always did early on. His test for a hit is a song that makes you want to roll the window down and turn it up.
“Worst Way,” “Don’t Mind If I Do” and “Jesus Saves” were all solo writes, and by December 2025 he had become the first artist since Taylor Swift with back-to-back solo-written No. 1s. He told Billboard he has never stopped co-writing, but that writing a song by yourself has something authentic about it.
That’s Just Me arrived on September 18, and Green is a writer on most of its 19 tracks, including five solo writes, among them “Well Well Whiskey,” which features Jake Worthington. Dann Huff produced it, with Green serving as coproducer, and it opened at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, the first top 10 of his career on that chart.
The 2027 That’s Just Me tour opens April 1 in Spokane, Washington. Radio airplay is great, he has said, but he knows he is on to something when fans sing a song back to him. The man who never liked hearing his own voice built a career on songs only he could write, and on that tour, the crowds will be singing them for him.
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