Ryan Waters, a rising country music star from Luverne, Alabama, embodies the values of hard work and resilience he learned growing up in his close-knit Southern hometown. With no musical lineage to lean on, Waters taught himself guitar during high school, mastering iconic songs like Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Sweet Child of Mine' and later developed his vocal skills through relentless practice. After a brief stint as a college baseball player, Waters discovered his passion for songwriting at Troy University, ultimately leaving his senior year behind to pursue his Nashville dreams. Balancing his time between teaching, playing bar gigs, and posting music on TikTok, he gained widespread attention with streaming hits like ‘Tomorrow’s Not Tonight' and his cover of ‘Chasing Cars.' Now based in Nashville, Waters' debut album, ‘All I’ve Ever Known,' showcases his heartfelt, authentic storytelling and solidifies his place as one of country music’s promising new voices.
Read our review of ‘All I've Ever Known' right here. We were thrilled to catch up with Ryan to talk all about it.
Thank you for your time today Ryan, we know how busy you must be in the build up to the album release. Is it strange knowing your debut album is coming out? How excited are you?
I think the closer release day comes the more surreal it feels! I have a mix of nerves and excitement about the release. It's my debut album and the world gets to know who you are as an artist and a person and it's something I've dreamed about for a long time.
I spent the holidays in Alabama although I live here in Nashville and being gone 3-4 weeks over Christmas meant that you get back to town and all of a sudden it's 2025 and the album is coming out and it's time to hit the ground running! (laughing)
You came from a small town in Alabama. How has that small town upbringing shaped you as a person and an artist?
I still hold a lot of those small town values and characteristics. Hunting was a big thing where I came from, sports too. Your younger years tend to translate to your older life and it has translated to my music as well – the album is called ‘All I've Ever Known' for a reason! Every aspect of this album has come from that influence.
There are two tracks on the album that are outside cuts, which is new for me, but we found two songs that just fit me to a tee. The rest is ‘All I've Ever Known.' It feels like home and even the two outside cuts we changed the lyrics on a little to fit me and where I grew up.
Which two songs were the outside cuts?
‘Back Way Back' and ‘Wasn't the Truck.' The latter is a song about being the guy you finally realise was at fault, maybe I was the reason she drove away, right? ‘Back Way Back' is a nostalgic song about wanting to go back to simpler times. I remember my parents telling me that I would miss my hometown life when I grew up, moved on and was paying my own bills. You don't think about it at the time but ‘Back Way Back' is a song that suggests that maybe they were right afterall! As a kid you are always so gung-ho in moving on to the next thing and there comes a time when you realise what you might have walked away from or given up.
On your Instagram page you said that you've always been fascinated by album covers. Tell me about the cover for ‘All I've Ever Known.'
We released a few singles in advance from the album last year and we were going with drawings for the covers of those songs, which I found really intriguing. They are all kind of cohesive in the way they fit together but friends, family and the label wanted the album to have my face on it – they thought it was important that people saw who I was. Is this guy really Country? Does he wear boots? A hat? All those things matter when you discover a new artist.
Where I grew up was full of rusty barns, cows, old wooden fences out in the middle of nowhere so we went with a picture that represented that. That's what the cover emboies. I went back to the early Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan covers because some of those pictures and covers have become truly iconic – hopefully ten years from now, when this record is platinum, we'll think that it was a great choice for the cover.
You were focused on baseball for a large part of your early life. What standard did you get to and when did music start to eclipse it?
It was probably my third year of college that music began to fascinate me. Where I grew up, it's unheard of for someone to pursue a career in music and lots of people of people here were kinda unsure that I could do it. I would play and sing in bars and restaurants for three or four hours at a time – I did all that I could to get my name out there, any gig, any show.
After I'd been doing that for a while I started to try and dig into the songwriting thing a little. I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could write a song that I was proud of. I was on Instagram, searching for a producer in Nashville. I sent him a song and he was, like, ‘You need to come to town immediately, we need to record this!' We ended up recording it and the rest is history, that would have been back in 2018, under the name of just ‘Ryan Waters' – we hadn't tagged ‘Band' onto the title yet. It was a very big risk for a small town kid! (laughing)
Which song on the album was the easiest to write and which song took the longest to get it to where you wanted it to be?
The easiest song to write was probably ‘In the Mirror,' which is a song about my grandfather who passed away in 2024 at 98 years old. He lived a very long life and saw a hell of a lot! We talked about everything – his time in the military, his marriage – when you get to 98 you've seen a lot of life and changing times, hell, you've seen damn near everything so that song was the easiest to write because I knew him so well and I knew what I wanted to say.
‘When It Don't,' which is the focus track on the album, probably took the longest. That was one where were sat down and we didn't know what we were gonna write that day. We knew we wanted to write a cool, catchy break up song and we took it from there. The title of the album is actually a lyric in that song too, which is cool. It's a conversation between two guys at a bar about relationships and failure. That song took us the longest because it was so detailed and intentional.
‘Her and Nascar' is an intriguing song with a lot of depth behind it. Tell me more about that one.
That song was a difficult song to write. Someone very close and near and dear to my heart……. I was looking at her life… She kinda grew up without a father figure which was the inspiration behind the song. Her mother had to be both parental roles so I used elements of my own life and her life to create this narrative. The Nascar element came from my own life, my family loved Nascar and we were fascinated by the relationship between Dale Earnhardt senior and Dale Earnhardt junior – something clicked and inspired me to write a song about a kind who sees a relationship that he's never had right there on the TV.
It's a tough song and the instrumentation on it is cool too, and there's a bunch of rock and country elements at play too. It was originally just called ‘Nascar' until we added in the mother / father figures and parental side to it.
I really like the song ‘Whiskey Talkin' but I'm not sure I like the guy in it! Isn't he just using the excuse of alcohol to excuse his bad behaviour? (laughing)
(laughing) The guy in the song, I guess, is kinda a douche, right? (laughing) When we sat down to write that song, it was with two people I'd never written with before. When that happens you don't quite know what you are going to get. We sat down and I said I wanted to write a really fun song. I felt like the album was coming together really well but there was a lot of sad songs and heartbreak songs on it but where was the fun?
Steve Soloman had the title ‘Whiskey Talkin' and he threw it out there, Frasier, the other writer on the song, started humming a melody and I came in with, ‘It wasn't me, it was the whiskey talkin' and we ran with it from there. We did ask ourselves if this guy was an awful human being!! (laughing) There obviously are guys out there like him, not caring about people's feelings, saying whatever is on his mind after he's had a few drinks, you know? Everybody has said something or done something because of alcohol at some point in their lives and so that's where the song relates to a wider audience – it reminds me of the old Shaggy song, ‘It Wasn't Me'! I like to think it's the same guy in both songs. (laughing)
In my mind it's the same guy in your song ‘Bloodstream' a little further in on the album and there's a little redemption there as he tries to come to terms with the addiction.
If you look at the album there might even be this ongoing storyline throughout the album that I, maybe, didn't even see at first. You go from ‘Whiskey Talkin' and then maybe fast forward ten years in this guy's life to ‘Whiskey on a Weekday' where he's still in the bar, reminiscing on how he might have screwed up, which is also echoed on a song like ‘Wasn't the Truck.' Then comes ‘Bloodstream.'
I'm a religious guy and I actually wrote that song with this girl who was about 5ft 2inches tall, super religious Christian girl who brought out some of the darkest lyrics I've ever heard! It's a dark, heavy song and at the end of the song I wanted to really hone in on the ‘fighting your demons' elements of it so if you listen carefully you can hear me whispering the lyrics which is meant to sound like demon chatter and the voices inside your head. You don't know what choice the guy in the song ended up making – which is very reflective of real life and the choices we all face in our everyday lives.
When I listen to an album I don't just want to listen to the single or the viral songs, I want to listen to the deep cuts, to the unreleased songs and get a feel for the flow and narrative of the album so when people get to the end of ‘All I've Ever Known' I like to think they have been on a journey that has helped them to relate to things going on in their own lives.
The Ryan Waters Band debut album ‘All I've Ever Leave' is out now. Go check it out and go on a journey alongside this talented, emerging artist.
