Well now I can’t unhear it.
Chances are you’ve probably gotten Ella Langley and Riley Green‘s viral hit “You Look Like You Love Me” stuck in your head a time or two…hundred. The catchy duet went viral on social media when it was released back in August of last year, and immediately became an earworm that was impossible to get out of your head.
The song co-written along with Riley and Aaron Raitiere was Ella’s first entry on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 chart, debuting at #53 and peaking at #30 back in October of 2024. And it rocketed Ella into the mainstream (where she belongs) as one of the hottest up and coming artists in country music.
But now I’m never going to be able to listen to it the same way…
A post on Reddit pointed out that the intro to the song sounds eerily similar to a song that anybody growing up in the ’90s probably recognizes: The theme song to the hit children’s show Blue’s Clues.
Take a listen.
@_aaronryan
I mean, it’s only the first couple of notes, but now I can’t unhear it.
Now, just to be clear, I don’t think anybody believes “You Look Like You Love Me” copied the Blue’s Clues theme song. There are only so many notes, rhythms, sounds, and ways you can put them together. The intro to Ella’s hit song is clearly trying to evoke the sound of a wild west saloon as it tells the story of a woman flipping the script and making the first move on a man.
But once you hear it, chances are you’ll think of it every time the song plays now.
As if it wasn’t already stuck in my head enough…
Here are both songs:
Blue’s Clues
You Look Like You Love Me
While the song has been a massive hit for both Ella and Riley, she admits that at first she didn’t think it was one she would ever even record.
Ella co-wrote most of the song with Raitiere, 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 her co-writer asking her about her love life during a write:
“‘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, with Ella explaining 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 “You Look Like You Love Me” 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 was different than the typical country cliches, a role reversal from what you hear in most country songs.
But someone on Ella’s team, who signed her to her first publishing deal, loved the song, and encouraged her to actually cut it, though she was initially 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.”
Soon after, Riley asked Ella to go on tour with him, and 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. 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 Jamey Johnson’s “In Color,” but on the last night, he finally brought her up for that duet, which was the 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” last fall.
Not bad for a song you weren’t even planning on recording.
