Wales Toney ’16
Toney bursts onto country music’s scene after finding his creative passion
Wales Toney grew up watching country music videos, but he never thought he’d win awards making them. So, you will have to forgive him if his new reality still has him pinching himself.
Toney co-directed the music video for Ella Langley’s hit song “You Look Like You Love Me,” which won the 2025 Country Music Association Music Video of the Year. The Academy of Country Music selected the video, which co-starred fellow country artist Riley Green, as Visual Media of the Year.
“It felt like it was this dream that I’m going to wake up from and none of this is going to happen. None of this is going to be true,” Toney says. “That’s really what I felt like.”
A native of Anderson, South Carolina, Toney earned a bachelor’s degree in management from Clemson University, but he’d always had a creative side and a love for country music that he credited to family influence. “My mom was always playing country music in the car going to school,” Toney recalls of his childhood.
While pursuing his undergraduate degree, he scratched his creative itch by landing a photography internship with Decipher, a student-produced magazine highlighting Creative Inquiry research. He began posting his work to social media, which caught the eye of friends and acquaintances he’d met at Clemson. It wasn’t long before some of them started reaching out with requests to shoot their wedding video, which Toney spent weekends doing on the side while working a sales job in Greenville, South Carolina, after graduation.
“I realized, ‘Oh, I can actually make a living doing this,’” Toney says.
On a whim, Toney volunteered to shoot concert footage for Muscadine Bloodline during one of their tour stops in Greenville in 2018. That connection led to the Nashville, Tennessee-based country music duo inviting him to the city to shoot one of their videos.
“When I got to start working with artists and bands, I knew,” he says. “This was exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.”
With career ambitions of working with artists and their labels full-time, Toney founded Whale Tale Media, a full-service production company, and moved to Music City. Running in the same country music circles, Toney eventually met Langley, who requested his company’s services to shoot the video for the hit single from her debut album. The award-winning video has more than 65 million views on YouTube.
“When I first started, I just knew I could film (a video) and make it look good, but I had no idea how to tell a story and actually make it into something that was interesting,” Toney says. “I’ve had to continue to grow and get better at that.
“I had a mindset that I was going to be successful no matter what I did, and it’s really a dream come true to even be able to be in the shoes that I’m in now.”
Toney’s company has worked with other notable industry names, including Blake Shelton, Noah Cyrus and six-time Grammy winner Jason Isbell, to name a few. He pointed to an awakening Clemson Experience as the catalyst that put him on the fast track to country music’s biggest stage.
“I credit Clemson for pretty much everything to sparking my creative journey,” he says.
FUN FACT: A standout prep pitcher at T.L. Hanna High School, Toney attended Clemson on a baseball scholarship.
