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’

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 brought up “Think as You Drunk,” and the reaction was strong.

“As soon as he said it, I knew it was going to be a fun idea,” McCubbin says.

It didn’t take long — both Green and Dylan think they finished it in 20 minutes, mostly building a story around the “Drunk” chorus. In the opening verse, the character gets belligerent with a bartender when he’s cut off — “I pay the light bill in this bar” — but doesn’t quite veer into obnoxiousness.

“You want to like the guy,” Green says, “whether he’s doing things that are ridiculous or not.”

A couple of his sentences come out backward in the chorus — “I ain’t as think as you drunk I am,” “I can’t say my CBAs” — but he insists that he can sing every song on the jukebox.

“I was picturing the guy pointing at a jukebox,” Green notes, “but it was just an ATM machine or a popcorn machine. That’s how drunk he was.”

In verse two, he shows up at home, missing a boot and sleeping in the yard.

“If you don’t know who that character is,” McCubbin quips, “it might be you.”

Green recorded a guitar/vocal work tape, ad libbing a line about holding “a cold one in all three hands” on the final chorus and slowing the tempo briefly just before the choruses. He lived with that version until he recorded it with producer Dann Huff (Keith Urban, Kane Brown) at Nashville’s Sound Stage on Oct. 28.

When Green played the work tape, the musicians needed little discussion about what to play. The only real stumbling block was the tempo changes, and to get around that, they scrapped the metronomic click track and kept their own tempo. They left it up to Green to lead the musicians as they picked the pace back up after the pre-chorus pause.

“Riley was a little uncomfortable leading us out of those moments where we’d ritard and stop,” Huff says. “He wasn’t used to doing that, except when he has a guitar in his hand, and he wasn’t playing guitar.”

Justin Schipper played a few drunk-sounding steel fills, and Gordon Mote delivered a honky-tonk keyboard part.

“Gordon smokes that piano,” Dylan says.

Green used the “CBAs” line to sound a little more intoxicated in each subsequent chorus, and his in-studio performance became the final version. Fiddler Stuart Duncan overdubbed his part, including a sizzling solo with an eye-popping, frenetic finale, concocted on his third pass.

“I love Stuart’s fiddle playing so much because he’s that bluegrass guy,” Huff says, “but he’s also the Angus Young of fiddle players.”

Green wanted to make sure Keith’s team understood that he was tipping his hat to a personal hero, so he contacted Keith’s manager, TKO Artist Management president T.K. Kimbrell, who in turn played the song for the family. Green planned to donate a portion of the proceeds to Keith’s foundation, but Keith’s estate wanted to take it further: they suggested inserting a line from Keith’s performance on the “As Good as I Once Was” recording.

Huff inserted it into the end, muting another section of Duncan’s performance to make room for Keith’s vocal, extracted from the original recording with the Moises app. Keith’s song was in a different key, and it didn’t quite line up rhythmically since “Think as You Drunk” wasn’t cut with a click track.

“You just have to trim and tease to make it sit right,” Huff says.

Nashville Harbor tabbed it as a single from the outset.

“My record label lost their mind over the song, even before Toby was a part of it,” Green says. “There wasn’t a lot of discussion about it. It was just, ‘This is the one.’”

“Think as You Drunk” debuts at No. 24 on the Hot Country Songs chart dated June 13 and ranks No. 29 on the corresponding Country Airplay list. Having Keith’s voice on one of his recordings is rewarding to Green.

“I played it for my buddies back home,” he notes. “Their eyes would light up when they’d hear that part. That’s when you know you’re onto something pretty good.”