by Chelsea Gamble  - Photos by Scott Stephenson

Owen Riegling is a man with momentum. It has only been two and a half years since he won the Emerging Artist Showcase that kicked his Country music career into high gear, and a whole heck of a lot has happened since then. Riegling signed a record deal, had a song go platinum, won a few CCMA Awards, performed at the Grey Cup, released his first EP, and headlined his first national tour, among other things.

26-year-old Riegling grew up on a farm near Mildmay, and he wears his hometown pride on his sleeve.

Mildmay is the inspiration for many of the songs he’s been bringing to the world, including his smash hit “Old Dirt Roads.” He played gigs all over Bruce County to raise the money for his first real guitar – a Gibson J-45 that is still his weapon of choice on stage. Everywhere he goes, Riegling makes sure that the audience knows where he comes from. He’s the unofficial ambassador of Bruce County - a polite, charming country boy keeping his wits about him in a wild world. He only wants to write about the things he feels are true, and that truth is connecting with rural and urban people wherever he goes.

Riegling has been doing interviews with The Citizen (our sister publication) since before he was famous, and was happy to squeeze in a chat with The Rural Voice during an Ontario tour at the end of November, the day before a show at the London Music Hall.  

“I went to school in London,” he explained. “I always dreamed of, you know, even just getting to step on stage at the Music Hall.” After London, he was heading to Toronto to play the Danforth Music Hall. 

“But this is the real deal. We get to do 90 minutes, headlining, sold out. Which is like, insane to me. Those are both legendary venues. I can't believe that I get to do that. So, yeah, they're going to be some of the best shows on this tour, I guarantee it.”
Venturing out from the reliable love and support of his hometown crowd was a risk - Riegling wasn’t sure how his simple country tunes would go over in the bigger cities, but he took the risk, and it paid off. “It has surpassed all my expectations of what I thought could be possible. You know, people show up in Vancouver, and Edmonton, and Calgary and Winnipeg and they're singing every word to these songs. It's just - it's a dream come true. Like, it's something that I never thought would be possible.”

He may be on the move a lot more now, but he knows how to hold on to the things that really matter. He rescued the old Mildmay town sign when it was slated for demolition, fixed it up, and brings it everywhere. And they’ve been going all over the place these days. The sign has been across the country three times this year, and isn’t at risk of falling apart anymore.

“I got it retrofitted into a nice rolling road case. It’s reinforced, and it comes apart into three pieces now,” he explained. “I got a stand for it now. So, it’s doing well - I wouldn't say it's in any worse shape than it was when I picked it up off the side of the road.”
When The Citizen first interviewed Riegling, it was at the Music in the Fields festival in Lucknow in 2023 and there was no manager to go through. To interview him back then, you just had to stand by the fence after soundcheck, yelling “Owen!”’until he came over. That was his first time performing on the festival’s main stage, and his obvious excitement was infectious. 

Back then, Riegling still had some free time. “I used to play hockey in Blyth all the time. I stopped when I went to college, cause I didn’t want to keep driving back and forth. I would love to play men’s league or something, but it’s always on Friday nights, and those are usually gigging nights,” he explained.

Momentum soon began to build around this polite young man. Little groups of Owen fans were forming locally. People set up lawn chairs in the hot sun, waiting for him to do soundcheck and a long line wound around the merch table, made entirely out of people willing to wait 20 minutes for a photo with him or his autograph. A woman in line boasted that Owen’s uncle did her taxes, and everybody was impressed. It took a long time for Riegling to hug and chat with everybody in the line, but he got it done. No fan left behind.

Now that he has thousands of fans instead of dozens, it isn’t really feasible or safe for Riegling to hang out by the merch table. Instead, the audience can sign his denim jacket as a surrogate. He still finds little ways to connect with people during shows. In Toronto, he searches the crowd for people with blue collar jobs, and chats with them about what they do for a living.

Staying grounded can be tricky when your life feels like it’s constantly expanding in every direction. “My wife Liv, who’s always on the road with us, she makes sure to, you know, put me in my place and keep me humble. And I got all kinds of good friends and stuff out here. I don't see myself ever, you know, becoming an a**hole, but I mean, I'll do my best to always try to stay myself.”
He also finds that nothing is more calming than being on the family farm in Mildmay. “I always like winter wheat. When you got a nice field of winter wheat, and it's blowing in the wind, it looks kind of like the ocean.” 

If he could give one piece of advice to himself from 12 months ago, he’d tell himself to rest up. “I think what I would tell myself back then is to enjoy this time that you have to sleep, and don't take it for granted, because you're not gonna be sleeping much for the next 12 months! It has been a crazy year. I think it all comes down to just loving what I do, and feeling very driven to keep going. So I’d just tell myself to keep doing it.”

This is going to be a big year for Owen. “We’re playing a ton of festivals, which I’m super excited about. Liv and I are living in Nashville for the first four months of the year. And I’ll be doing a whole bunch of writing. I'm going into the studio. I'm gonna make a new record. So there will be tons of new music in 2025, lots of new shows and outside of that, I mean, we’ll see what happens. Anything could happen.”