I need the acoustic version like I need oxygen. Riley Green’s duet with Ella Langley “Don’t Mind If I Do,” which was the title track to Riley’s 2024 third studio album, is already a hit at country radio, as it previously peaked at #1 on the Billboard US Country Airplay chart. In addition, it became a minor crossover hit, peaking at #23 on the Billboard Hot 100 all-genre chart, and it’s easily one of my favorite songs from his aforementioned album.
He truly writes something special anytime he pens a song by himself, and others like “Jesus Saves” and “I Wish Grandpa’s Never Died” come to mind as examples, and the story of how Riley wrote “Don’t Mind If I Do” might surprise you in terms of how it started out as much more upbeat tune.
Riley told Katie Neal during an interview on her Katie & Company radio show that he penned it while backstage at a show in Rogers, Arkansas:
“I was in the green room in Rogers, Arkansas, I played a show at the Walmart amphitheater. And there’s a Topgolf next door, and I had a bunch of buddies from Arkansas come to the show, and they were all going to Topgolf, and remember thinking, yeah I’ll send them all over there and then I can like have some quiet.
So I sent everybody to Topgolf, and I wrote the song in the green room. I remember my security guard kept busting in and checking on me, and I was like, ‘I’m fine.’”
He had a guitar lick that was a bit slower, and once he tried that out with this idea of “don’t mind if I do,” Riley says it was “really easy to write”:
“I had the idea for a while. I think it was gonna be like a fun, beer drinking song. Don’t mind if I do, like, I went out last night. And that was the way I pictured it. So I sat down with the song, and I had this little guitar lick I was doing, and I thought about, man, how cool would it be if it was like, don’t mind if I do to that call from that ex or whatever it is. And so I went down that road, and it was a really easy song to write.
And the first song I had written as a duet without a female involved in it. So that’s a little weird, you know, to write a females perspective on a chorus at the end but I thought that was cool.”
It’s truly a perfect country duet, and earlier on his Instagram stories, Riley shared a beautiful acoustic version that I can’t get enough of. I’ve said it a million times, but Riley with just an acoustic guitar is my favorite form to hear his music, and I need to know why a studio recording of this one on his acoustic Midtown Sessions EP wasn’t included…
You can watch it HERE, and I’m going to have this on repeat all day now…
“Don’t Mind If I Do”