The story behind the viral hit.
This week, Ella Langley appeared on the God’s Country podcast, and she talked a lot about her viral hit with Riley Green, “You Look Like You Love Me.”
Ella co-wrote most of it with Aaron Ratiere, while Riley came up with the words for his second verse later on, after Ella had already cut it as a solo song. She recalled Aaron asking her about her love life during a write, and she told him:
“‘Honestly, I’m at the point where if they look like they love me, I gotta get out of there. It’s just too much for me right now.’ And we giggled at that, and then as songwriters, when you hear something like ‘you look like you love me,’ we’re like, ‘Well there’s a title, You Look Like You Love Me.’
And we just wrote the title down… we wrote the song in 2022, so six months later, we had an afternoon write, he loves to talk about how I brought in this bowl of spaghetti. I made my lunch, brought it in… and we say this is like the luckiest bowl of spaghetti. I think we might get a tattoo with a tiny piece of spaghetti on it.”
They sat down and penned it very quickly, and Ella explained that she was inspired by what she called the “talking country” she grew up on, specifically one of her first favorite songs in David Coe’s “You Never Even Called Me by My Name.”
She didn’t think “YLLYLM” would ever even make it onto a record, because they were “just talking,” not really singing, and in terms of the content of the lyrics, it certainly was very different than the typical country cliches with the woman walking up to the man in a role reversal from most country music.
In my opinion, that’s what made it really work…
Someone on Ella’s team, who signed her to her first publishing deal, loved the song, and encouraged Ella to actually cut it, though she was very hesitant:
“Maya heard it and loved it, tried to get me to put it in the dropbox for the EP I put out, ‘Excuse The Mess,’ and I was like, ‘No way, man. No one’s gonna like that song.’ I thought it was more of a joke… I love a funny song.
When we were cutting for the record, she slipped it in there, she didn’t tell me, it was the last song on there. And I got calls from my agent, from people high up in my record label that hadn’t called me, all these people from this sh*tty work tape.
There’s all these great demos… at this point, I’ve got great demos now. The worst sounding one on there. We cut it on the first round we cut songs, it wasn’t gonna be a duet.”
Right after that, Riley asked her to go on tour with him (which would’ve been the tour they wrapped up in the Spring). Ella asked him to write a verse about what his reaction would be if a woman walked up to him at a be like it describes in the song, and it came out exactly how you hear it on the studio cut.
She said she didn’t hear from Riley for a while, and he finally called her one day while she was getting her nails done to tell her he’d sent her his verse, and she of course loved it.
They cut it in the studio, and Ella explained that she really wanted to do it with him so they could sing it together on tour every night… but they never did. They sang other songs, like “In Color,” but on the last night, he finally brought her up fro that duet, which was they first time they had ever done it live in public and Ella had no warning.
That video quickly went viral, and of course, the song was included on Ella’s debut studio album Hungover, and has become one of the biggest hits of the year. Now a #1 at country radio, they also won the CMA Award for Musical Event of the Year for “You Look Like You Love Me” just last month.
In the long run, what makes it different is what makes it so unique and fun, and I’m glad that it wound up becoming part of Ella’s album and her first big hit, even if she was hesitant at first.
You can watch her talk about it on the podcast here:
“You Look Like You Love Me”