Riley Green Reveals Why He Chose Carly Pearce To Mentor His Team on ‘The Voice’

Riley Green is bringing a familiar face to The Voice, as he revealed he has tapped Carly Pearce to serve as a mentor for his team. The country star admits, his “If I Don’t Leave, I’m Gonna Stay” duet partner felt like a natural choice when it came time to finding someone to help guide his team through the competition.

Green has admired Pearce as an artist for a long time, and got an even closer look at her creative process while working together on their steamy duet earlier this year. He tells Billboard that the experience pushed him outside of his comfort zone and gave him a firsthand look at the kind of wisdom and guidance that Pearce could bring to the mentorship role.

“When she asked me to be a part of that song, that was a stretch for me,” Green notes. “It sounded like Charles Kelley on the demo or him and Ryan Hurd mixed together. How they phrased things and the harmonies was really not where I would have went…That’s probably the most I’ve had to learn to sing something. And I think that’s what this show’s about. It’s about trying things you’re not comfortable with, so she was an obvious choice for me when I was trying to coach somebody else. She knows what she’s doing.”

With blind auditions already underway, viewers have gotten the chance to see the “Think As You Drunk” singer’s team start to grow with emerging country acts. Pearce’s experience in the genre makes her an especially fitting mentor. She plans to work alongside Green to help his artists identify their strengths while encouraging them to lean into what makes them unique.

Pearce told the outlet that she sees her role as a chance to “give constructive criticism, but also build them up in what makes them unique and good, and or what I see maybe that is a little bit special that they could work on.”

She adds, “Maybe our role would be to find the things that we think they do really well, and hopefully it means a lot coming from somebody that they grew up listening to telling them that they’re really good at this particular thing, and that’s what they need to lean into.”

The Kentucky native will appear on the show beginning Tuesday Oct. 6 and will also be in episodes airing Oct 12-13, 19 and 26. This won’t be Pearce’s first time on The Voice, having previously served as a playoff advisor for Michael Bublé in 2024.

 “No matter what genre of music you do, you’ve been in [the contestants’] shoes in some form or fashion,” Pearce said of that experience. “You’ve had a dream, and you’ve wanted to do this. I think I’m just trying to see what makes each person unique. For Michael’s team, there was nobody in my [realm] of country music, but just getting in there and kind of seeing what their strengths were was really a fun thing for me, and I just really enjoyed it.”

Riley Green is currently serving a as a coach for the first time on Season 30 alongside fellow coaches Adam Levine, Kelly Clarkson and Queen Latifah.

Fans will also see him return to the red chair next year, for the special season of The Voice: Celebrity, which is set to premiere on NBC in 2027.