When Reagan Richards tells you that she drove down to Nashville in a hearse, your first thought may be that she has to be joking.
“A hearse, believe it or not,” she began, “is a great vehicle for loading musical equipment because it’s got the rollers in the back.”
Your second thought immediately after will be that she is absolutely not joking, and instead, this fact only demonstrates her determination to pursue music in any capacity—going so far as to carry her Walkman in her work apron so that music business customers could listen to her demo.
“I was one of those annoying people,” she laughed. “I was that server that, anytime music business people came in, I was like, ‘You want to hear my demo?’ They were like, ‘Well, I don’t have anything here.’ I was like, ‘No, I do.’”
Richards’s journey didn’t start in Nashville, however; she’s an East Coast girl through and through. When her father decided to pursue his fashion career in New York City, he moved from Pittsburgh to New Jersey, where Richards called home. Richards lived her early life between the neighboring states, though, as the rest of her family stayed in Pittsburgh. When loneliness crept in—with her sisters hours away in Pennsylvania—Richards turned to music for company.
“I was always missing somebody,” Richards remembered. “So music was my friend. I got to hear these singers singing to me, and I could sing back to them. I really feel like it was sort of like the closest thing I had to an interaction with somebody. When I was young, I didn’t play with a lot of kids. So music was sort of like that. Music was really my adventure.”
With a mother who sang big band music and a father who loved country, Richards had an endless supply of records to choose from. In the end, the genre that stole her heart was country.
She said, “From an early age, [country music] just reminded me of my family, my dad. We’d be in the station wagon, and my dad would have Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins. Country music just reminds me of that station wagon. It reminds me of just the cassette tapes in the car and of really simple times with my dad.”
And as she says, country artists are an open book. Without the cryptic lyrics that often pervade much of the most popular rock songs—think Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”—country songs give listeners something to relate to.
“When I started writing, I was like, ‘I wanna write something that somebody’s gonna sit in front of me, and they’re gonna go, “Oh my God, that’s me. That’s me in the song.”’ Because you can write for yourself, and that’s cool. But the reason why I can sit and feel so much about music is because whoever’s written that song, I feel they’ve written about me,” she said.
It was then in 1994 that Richards moved to Nashville with her mom and sister, and also when music producers told her that she was too young.
“They’d never tell you now that you’re too young,” Richards said. “You could be five years old, and they’d be like, ‘All right.’ But back then they were like, ‘You’re too young, go back home, get yourself together.’ And I went back home, I joined a band, and within about two years, I was like, ‘I’m ready.’”
And Richards has never really stopped being ready. From there, she has accumulated years of experience—including a Top 30 hit on the country charts with her band Williams Honor—some of which she shares as a songwriting mentor with RiverJAM Music. On November 4, Richards will be taking the stage again at the nonprofit’s Songs & Stories event, along with Emily Grove and Tristan McIntosh.
“The last time [Gordon Brown and I] were there (Songs & Stories), we did some stuff from our upcoming album,” she recalled when thinking about what songs she would sing for her upcoming solo performance. “Sometimes, it’s just fly by the seat of your pants and go, ‘I’m feeling this song.’ And then sometimes you do put a little more thought into it. Sometimes you can have something that’s brand new. It’s just fresh up, and you’re like, ‘I have to do this.’ And then other times you want to pull out things that have been your comfort zone, and you want to show people like, ‘Look, this is a songwriter show. We want to play our song that was a top 30. We want to show you what we do, what has been like a really nice cozy blanket for us. And we hope that you’re feeling comfortable with it too.’”
That sense of comfort is something that Richards and the other RiverJAM mentors bring into each of their writing sessions with songwriters of all stages. “Writing is subjective,” she admitted. “So when you’re sitting in this hot seat, and you’ve got all of these people sitting there, and you’re speaking from a position of experience… and you have these people now listening and taking in what you’re saying and writing it down and feeling like this can help them, that’s really a good feeling.”
And looking towards the future, with an upcoming European tour and a new album on the horizon, one thing that Richards hopes to stay with is RiverJAM Music. “For it to be a little over a year,” she began about the nonprofit, “it’s unbelievable the things that they are doing, and it is building tremendously. They are a force, and they are going to be around for a long time. They’re going to do great things.”
Photo courtesy of Reagan Richards | Interviewed on October 20, 2026
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