There’s no doubt that Ella Langley and Riley Green’s viral hit, “you look like you love me” is one of the biggest country songs of the year. Racking up over 75 million streams on Spotify alone and well over 112 million streams across all platforms, the track has been nothing short of a career-starter for Langley.
Though the track and its success seemed like a no-brainer due to its infectious chorus and chemistry between Langley and Green, it was actually never supposed to be released.
Appearing on The Bobby Bones Show earlier in the week, the duo was asked about the song’s creation and eventual massive success.
Green began by saying how he thought “you look like you love me” was a fun song but was a bit hesitant given that the spoken-word verses may have come across as a bit too “old-school,” “I thought the song was fun. [I] had no clue it was a giant hit. You know, I thought talking verses was a bit too old-school, a little too traditional, but how cool is it that a song that’s this country is doing this well?”
Despite loving the song, he never thought that it would go as viral as it has gone over the past three months, “I’ve never had any type of, I guess what you would call is like, viral [song], you know. And this song is really like viral. I mean, I can barely work TikTok. I don’t really know how that works, but it’s just everywhere, so you’d get your phone out, and it was every scroll you would hear this song playing. So I guess that was kind of the eye opening thing about it.”
And when Green says that the song went viral, he is not being hyperbolic by any means. Outside of the aforementioned 112+ million streams, “you look like you love me” has also been used over a staggering million times as a sound clip on TikTok alone, something which is no small feat.
Langley then dropped the bombshell that the track was written as a bit of a joke and was never actually supposed to be released, “The song was never supposed to leave my audio recordings. I wrote it as a joke with Aaron Ratier first, and then the label heard it and loved it and then Riley asked us on tour. And him and I just kind of being from the same area, growing up on the same kind of music, I was thinking maybe we could do it out on the road. That’s why I asked him to do it, and I was like ‘Hey, just kind of write the second verse how you would respond to a girl coming up to you like that.”
And the rest, as they say, was history.
Watch the full interview here: