Artist Feature: Riley Whittaker
We sat down with Nashville-based artist Riley Whittaker to talk about her artist journey, her upcoming EP, and the Nashville indie music community.
If I were a voting member of the Recording Academy, Riley Whittaker’s “Life After Death” would be my pick for song of the year. I sat down with Riley last week ahead of her new release but made sure to ask her all about “Life After Death” as well: “The song,” she said, “was partially written for one of my songwriting classes; it’s about knowing a relationship is toxic but not wanting to leave it because you’re afraid of what might happen if you do.” “Life After Death” perfectly encapsulates Riley’s distinct sound and gives us a glimpse of what’s still to come. Her breathy vocal timbre resembles that of inspirations Billie Eilish and Lizzy McAlpine, coupled with layers of high harmonies. Combine that with ToneDef production, her singer-songwriter roots, and a taste of Indie Nashville, and THEN you’ll have the amazing sound that is Riley Whittaker.
Riley began writing songs when she was 12, releasing them through SoundCloud (do NOT listen to her old music, she says….) and DistroKid, ultimately making her way to her current deal with AWAL (Speaking of AWAL, her first single with the distributor drops TODAY on all platforms. “Sedona” is the second of five songs on her upcoming EP The Bare Minimum, which you can expect sometime in March). Throughout her teenage years, Riley’s singer-songwriter roots gradually blended with the alternative rock she’d grown up listening to, and after a brief stint singing in a Led Zeppelin cover band in high school, she moved to Nashville in 2020 to fully pursue music. If you listen to “Nostalgia” and “Preoccupied” back-to-back, you’ll hear the full spectrum of Riley’s genre range, which includes everything from pop synths and vocoders to fuzzy distorted guitars. Unlike most of her peers—full-time students with a music side hustle—Riley knew that music was in the cards from day one, and Belmont University was just a medium to develop her songwriting capabilities and meet fellow creators. She first got involved in the indie Nashville scene by booking fellow artists for shows and writers’ rounds: “I actually lived in Nashville before going to Belmont, and one of the biggest things that helped me was that I used to host writers’ rounds for artists. A lot of college students would reach out to me to play because they had just started at Belmont, so I met a ton of artists through that, and then when I got to Belmont the following year, I already knew a bunch of people.”
Better yet, that ability to meet and book artists simply comes naturally to her (I think my exact question was, “Have you always had that dawg in you?”): “I’ve always had that in me…I love booking things, putting together lineups, and helping other artists get involved because I know what it’s like to try to get involved and know that it’s hard to get the confidence to reach out to venues and ask people to play.” Her ambition and talent landed her several gigs in New York City last summer, and she’s secured countless opening, supporting, and headlining sets across some of Nashville’s most iconic venues. Today, the 19-year-old’s band and recording team is comprised of a “Who’s Who” of Indie Nashville, with features from guitarist Jake Zimmermann and drummer Aidan Cunningham of Edgehill, Zach Shirley of McKay, and Michael Alan Scott, among others. When talking about the names around her, she said, “Everyone’s trying to do the same thing, and it’s just a great community of people.”
The aptly named “Life After Death” bridges the past and future of her catalog, linking together the DIY distribution and production of “Hands on the Wheel,” “Love Somebody,” and “Maybe California” with the AWAL distribution and Grammy-caliber production we’ll see with this new EP. In other words, stay tuned…because, as amazing as her music already is, the best is yet to come.
You can listen to Sedona here and see the rest of her music here.