Riley Green on Honoring Toby Keith With ‘Think As You Drunk’ & What His Friends Thought: ‘Their Eyes Would Light Up When They’d Hear That Part’
Categoria: Musica
Inside the the writing and recording behind Riley Green's "Think As You Drunk."
Por Billboard | 12/06/2026
When Riley Green took consecutive solo-written songs to No. 1 on Billboard ’s Country Airplay chart in 2025, he became the first artist to accomplish that feat since Taylor Swift in 2011 and 2012. It’s not as common as it once was, but back in his prime, Toby Keith — acknowledged by Green as an influence — wrote a fair amount of his songs alone. That includes “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” and “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” titles that Green’s been known to cover in his concerts. “When I realized that he wrote so many of his own songs, especially by himself, that was something that was really motivating to me,” Green says. “Probably why I have so many solo writes on my records is for that reason.” With Green’s latest single — “Think as You Drunk,” released by Nashville Harbor to country radio on May 27 via PlayMPE — the influence is even clearer. As the recording plays out on first listen, it sounds like an interpolation of one of Keith’s hits, and before it’s all over, Keith himself makes a posthumous appearance through a sample of “As Good as I Once Was.” To be precise, “Think as You Drunk” is not an interpolation. It doesn’t borrow lyrics from Keith’s songs, nor does it take any melody from “Once Was.” It is, however, a swaggering, midtempo song, and its phrasing parallels Keith’s song, which spent six weeks at No. 1 in 2005. Plus, “Drunk” slows almost to a complete stop leading into the chorus, mirroring that aspect of Keith’s record. “Songs really take shape in the studio,” Green says. “Drunk,” he says, was originally cut as “an acoustic work tape we lived with for a while. There was something really fun about the song, and when we recorded it, it was obvious. It just had that feel to it.” The seeds of “Drunk” were sown four days before Keith was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Green played a concert at Joe’s Bar in Chicago on Oct. 16, 2024. Artist-writer Erik Dylan (“Damn Good Day to Leave,” “Last One to Know”) had ridden to Illinois, where they had Green’s live show in their creative crosshairs when they pulled a guitar off the tour bus wall. “He had either just played a show or was just getting ready to play a show, so he was feeling the crowd and everything,” Dylan recalls. “It wasn’t like we sat down to write a song. I just hit [record on my iPhone] when I thought we had something that was kind of cool.” The “Think as You Drunk” title had been around a while. Loretta Swit’s “Hot Lips” Houlihan character said a version of that line in a 1973 episode of the CBS sitcom M*A*S*H , and several songs had been written with that title. They worked up a rough chorus with a few holes in it, and held on to it for the next four months. In February 2024, they wrote a song with Jessi Alexander (“Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma,” “I Drive Your Truck”) and Wyatt McCubbin (“Sounds Like the Radio,” “Boots Off”) at 50 Egg Music on Nashville’s Music Row, and when they finished it, they had time left to try another. Green brou