Key Points
Riley Green says he almost dove into the crowd after he was hit in the face by a phone at a concert.
The country singer chose not “to let one person ruin it for everybody.”
Green has been experiencing a meteoric rise in the country music scene.
It took a lot of inner peace for Riley Green not to reprimand a fan after they threw a cellphone at him while he was performing.
The incident happened in March when Green, 37, was in Melbourne, Australia for a stop on his Cowboy As It Gets tour. The country singer was struck in the face by a phone thrown by a crowd member during the concert, and the impact split his ear open and left him bleeding on stage.
Green kept the show going despite the injury, but ultimately got five stitches on his earlobe post-show.
Of his reaction to the fan’s behavior, Green recently told Billboard that he was initially fired up and wanted to jump into the crowd.
“There was probably a moment where I thought about diving into the crowd and I reeled that back a little bit,” he told the outlet. “There’s people in the venue that paid good money to come see me play and it seems pretty childish for me to let one person ruin it for everybody.”
Plus, he added, “I got to be honest: I looked pretty cool with blood running down my neck singing ‘I Wish Grandpas Never Died.'”
Credit: Riley Green/Instagram
In viral videos of the incident, Green can be seen putting down his guitar and tensely looking out into the audience as fans boo over the foul play. The singer-songwriter then pointed to the culprit and said, “Get your a– on out of here, go on,” before they were reportedly escorted out of the concert.
As blood ran down his neck, he returned to his mic stand, smiled, and thanked the crowd for coming out to see him perform.
The Jacksonville, Alabama native told Billboard he was raised to be a gentleman, and also knows he’s lucky his rise to fame came in his 30s.
“I was just brought up to know how to treat people and how to talk to people [with] a certain level of respect. My granddaddy Buford used to give me and my cousins handshake competitions when we were kids,” he said, adding that doing press comes with its own challenges. “There’s going to be some things thrown at you when you’re doing interviews, especially in other countries, and you just got to kind of roll with it [and] get over yourself a little bit.”
Green also discussed his surprised yet gracious reaction to being given a kangaroo-scrotum bottle-opener on an Australian morning show in March. Of the novelty gift, he told Billboard, “I’d gone through my dumber years [already]. If this had happened to me when I was 22, it would have been mayhem. Just the level of maturity it takes to have this much attention on you is pretty tough, and I still don’t know every day that I have enough.”
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The “Think As You Drunk” crooner recently took home three trophies at the 2025 CMA Awards and music event of the year at the 2026 Academy of Country Music Awards. He also appeared in his first major TV role, a four-episode arc playing a former Navy SEAL with debilitating PTSD on CBS’ Yellowstone spinoff, Marshals.
“He’s just a good Alabama boy,” fellow country star Carly Pearce told Billboard of her friend Green. “When we’re together, he wants to talk about the fact that my parents live in Alabama and what can he do to accommodate them at his shows. He’s the same person that he was before [stardom] happened. I think that’s what makes him relatable. He has movie star looks, but a down-home heart. Girls want to come and see him, and the guys want to be his friend. That’s really so hard to get both.”
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