https://www.rileydowning.com/home daily 1.0 2026-06-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6001efa906d25c2e7c931c92/a53cf52e-220b-4e53-9865-2a2a10c9f659/RD_LandfillPoetry_Cover_3000px.jpg Home - New album, Landfill Poetry Available August, 28, 2026 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6001efa906d25c2e7c931c92/2a448bad-d6f8-4894-b24d-fbab5324b963/Screenshot+2026-06-23+at+1.13.15%E2%80%AFPM.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6001efa906d25c2e7c931c92/ac5aae46-cb5f-4b13-beab-efd0e4596875/Screenshot+2026-06-23+at+1.13.21%E2%80%AFPM.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6001efa906d25c2e7c931c92/1613504242606-T0MOC4E1WH90977VBVX5/RD-SIO-Test-Pressing.jpg Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6001efa906d25c2e7c931c92/5f128e22-c618-4359-8932-954d6c3f8ee7/3_bfd8f502-48a5-412f-9023-cb64f703b319_2048x2048.webp Home https://www.rileydowning.com/video daily 0.75 2021-07-11 https://www.rileydowning.com/tour daily 0.75 2025-11-19 https://www.rileydowning.com/contact daily 0.75 2026-06-24 https://www.rileydowning.com/bio daily 0.75 2026-06-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6001efa906d25c2e7c931c92/7667d5ea-bfe5-4b78-afba-0c227bcef751/TM_07191.jpg Bio - Riley Downing, Landfill Poetry Riley Downing once spent his days as a trash man. He rolled down backroads in rural Missouri, tossing bags into the bed of a truck built with makeshift walls that kept in the day’s haul. Between stops, he spun a collection of Tom T. Hall hits on the stereo – the only CD in the cab. He wasn’t a full-time guitar picker yet, but he nonetheless counted down the hours until he could get back to playing songs. “After I graduated school, I ended up moving in with a buddy who had grown up with punk music but he kinda got into folk and blues together at the same time,” Downing said. “We’re living in a trailer for $100 or $200 dollars a month. We didn’t have internet, or anything. We’re studying all this music that’s new to us. John Prine, John Hartford, all this different folk stuff. Getting into bluegrass and old country. I finally had time to sit down and appreciate it.” Downing didn’t spend forever in the trash truck, of course. Life took him to New Orleans, Nashville, back to Missouri and around much of the world in the days between. Along the way, he sang songs seasoned by his time before he made a living on stage. And while some who look into a trash bin might only notice a pile of leftovers, Downing digs in, hoping to find a must-tell story. For years, he’s collected stories about life’s overlooked moments and underappreciated people. Now, listeners can hear these castaway truths and unearthed tales on Landfill Poetry, a new album from Downing out this year on Oh Boy Records. “A lot of my writing comes from nostalgia,” Downing said. “A story or a moment that somebody might never think about again, I might think about for the rest of my life.” He added, “Writing about anything, you just have this pile of memories and experiences. Thinking about where good lyrics come from, where do song ideas come from. Everyone has their piles of stuff. You’re not going to throw it out. You’re a hoarder of all these different, little things.” Born in North Carolina and raised in small-town Holt, Missouri, Downing cut his teeth at warehouse punk shows in Kansas City before eventually moving to New Orleans. In Louisiana, he joined forces with Sam Doores, John James Tourville and other likeminded musicians to form The Tumbleweeds, a band that morphed into sought-after swamp-country outfit The Deslondes, one of the coolest bands in Americana that still tours releases music today. When not swapping songs on stage with his Deslondes bandmates, Downing lends his burly baritone voice to a solo career that includes 2021 album Start It Over and the forthcoming follow-up, Landfill Poetry. Downing workshopped much of the new album during a period of downtime spent at his late grandparents’ house. Decades earlier, the same grandparents introduced a young Downing to classic country music years by dragging him to barn shows and rural dance halls to hear live honky-tonk tunes. At the makeshift retreat, he’d often spend nights writing – putting on a pot of coffee around 5 p.m. before settling in with an eight-track recorder and his guitar. The demos would sometimes come with off-the-cuff harmonies or a rhythm section created by a pair of Sharpie markers tapped on the kitchen table. I would just end up with a bunch of these little, weird demos where you don’t think about it too much but record whatever you’re thinking,” Downing said. “I just let it happen.” He continued to work on Poetry, bouncing between pre-production sessions in Kansas and North Carolina – the latter with Deslondes bandmate John James Tourville – before landing with longtime producer Andrija Toki at The Bomb Shelter recording studio in Nashville. On Poetry, Downing builds three-minute worlds out of once-dusty memories. The album opens with its title track, a swinging, harmonica-drenched slice of life as a trash collector that cleverly weaves together the lines, “This business stinks, but it’s pickin’ up/ Please drop me off, I think I’ve had enough/ Oh, but really what it is is I’m a guitar picker, even though you know me as a town can kicker.” From there, Downing reflectively ruminates with campfire folk tune “Chances,” delivers a foot-stompin’, fiddle-howlin’ country-western number with “Hurt To Fall” and captures an after-hours groove with “Night Shift,” a soulful song about those stuck working a lonely graveyard shift. But no song may stand out quite like “Helen & Gene,” an slow-burning autobiographical tune about his grandparents. Drawing specific imagery from family history, he sings in the opening lines, “I could see her in the winter of 1942, ridin’ that train with her flower dress on, the last one her mother made, too/ I could see him the same winter of 1942, ridin’ that train with his coveralls on, doin’ what he had to do.” The lines pull from the couple’s formative years; his grandmother often wore a flowered dress sewed by her mother, who died in a fire during the Great Depression. Before settling down together, they each rode the train from rural outskirts into Kansas City for blue collar work. “It’s the story of them meeting and starting that whole life together,” Downing said. “I always wanted to write a song for them and about those little stories that stuck out to me.” Landfill Poetry rolls on with songs such as “Hay Hay Hay” – a self-described “goofy” tune inspired in-part by staying up far too late – and “Porch Song,” a freestyling nod to slowing down after a long haul. The 12-song album closes with “Last Day of Mardi Gras,” a stripped-back number capturing the heaviness of a life that awaits after the house lights come on at the end of the night. It’s the last story in an album that from start-to-finish uncovers sketches of life that once might’ve been lost to the landfill. “Landfill Poetry is like having all these different little things that you don't know what you’re going to do with yet, but you know you’re going to do something with it some day,” Downing said. “It’s a piece of wood that sits in the shop for years and you don’t know why it’s there until that one day. It’ll see its day.”