Charlotte, TN — Warm and sunny Tuesday in May, Luke Combs He suggested to visitors to ride his property in the countryside of Tennessee on one of Polaris’s utility vehicles. The 140-acre forest, field and stream plot is about an hour from Nashville. It includes a pool, beach volleyball court, chicken shed, and a large white house on the top of a hill where he lives with his wife, who was eight months pregnant with the couple’s first child. increase.
About 50 yards from the house, there is a huge barn, a vast man’s cave with a pool table, weight room, beer taps, hunting trophies, arcade games, platinum records and a framed sports jersey. The beautifully restored Hunter Greene Ford Ranchero was sitting on the driveway in front of the house. Parked outside the barn was a brand new, deceived tour bus with a luxurious steam shower and a $ 4,000 coffee maker.
“I used to have a keurig,” Combs said with a confused laugh. “I think that wasn’t enough.”
Combs is currently one of the biggest stars in country music.his The first 14 singlesEverything, including the first album “Doin’This” from the June 24th album “Growin’Up”, was number one on Billboard’s Country Airplay charts. His last album, “What You See Is What You Get,” opened to number one on the Billboard 200 with a huge amount of streaming, with 20 songs reaching the Hot 100. He recently sold out a soccer stadium in Denver, Nashville. , Seattle and Atlanta, and the Country Music Association’s dominant entertainer of the year. He did this one after another with uncontrollably catchy and widely relevant meat and potato national anthems, not by great musical innovation, cross-genre celebrity collaboration, or hosting a television song contest. Created and achieved.
In marketing terms, Combs is like someone you can imagine having a beer. Now he is facing an existential crisis often encountered by newly created stars: how do you maintain that person’s atmosphere when you literally live in a hilltop mansion. mosquito?
Unlike many country stars in modern vintages, the 32-year-old Combs doesn’t look like a sturdy and handsome model in the Bass Pro Shops ad. He seems to be a man shopping at Bass Pro Shops. He’s a big guy, but he doesn’t carry a threatening air. Wearing a white Vince Gill T-shirt and crumpled khaki, he walked towards the garage where Polaris was parked, raised his hand and apologized to the visitor. “Only one second,” he said. He needed to relieve himself. Then he stopped near the side door and pissed outdoors, right next to his mansion on the hill.
Combs grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. North Carolina is a small town with an apparently bohemian atmosphere, and he was a relatively indifferent student, not an athlete. He played soccer in high school, but he admitted that “playing” was a generous explanation. “I got on the bench,” he said. As a teenager, he worked at the Asheville Fan Depot. “Go-karts, climbing walls, laser tags-perhaps 60,000 square feet of fun,” he said, “unless you’re working there.” His household was never rich in money, but he felt his childhood was stable.
One of the things that made Combs stand out, or at least in retrospect, is notable is that he was always singing. Around the house, in a chorus of churches and schools. “I was just attracted to singing,” he said. His parents encouraged his interest in music. When he was in the first grade of middle school, they bought him a guitar. He quit after two lessons and put it in the closet. “I didn’t like it,” he said.
Combs enrolled at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, but spent more time hanging out and drinking than studying. In the summer after his third year, he returned to Asheville to work at Van Depot. “It was cruel,” he said. “Everyone was a high school student. I was an old man there.” One day, sitting on his porch, his mother didn’t start playing the guitar until neither Kenny Chesney nor Tim McGraw was 21. I commented that. Maybe it wasn’t too late for him.
“I still had a guitar that my parents had me in the closet,” he said. “So I pulled it out and taught myself to play.”
Not only did the guitar spend its time that summer, but when it returned to school in the fall, it solved other problems. “If you’re a £ 300 guy in college, how do you stand out against the opposite sex?” He asked. “You can’t really sing or do strange things at a party, but when you play the guitar, people feel like” cool! “
Combs met another student named Adam Church and the two started playing together. “Luke knew three or four chords, but it wasn’t good,” Church said in an interview. The two cover songs such as Luke Bryan’s “I don’t want to end this night” and Blake Shelton’s “Boys Round Here” and upload videos to YouTube and Vine. “Luke was the guy in this heavy set that looked like a normal person, but when he steps into the mic and opens his mouth, everyone will pay direct attention to him,” Church added. rice field.
Combs eventually quit college and began playing more often around North Carolina and later throughout the Southeast. At one point he auditioned for “The Voice.” “I turned my back because my story wasn’t interesting enough,” he said. In 2014 he moved to Nashville. The indifference he got from labels, publishers, managers, and almost everyone else in the industry was obvious.
“You walk in the door, and it’s” no “immediately before you say the word,” he recalled in a amiable, slightly embarrassed southern draw. “You have to think, everyone was hot at the time. The blueprint says,” Get a cool guy, auto-tune his voice, and then put out the song. In many ways. , It’s still like that. “
Nashville wasn’t interested in selling his song “Hurricane” for 15,000 downloads the week Combs became available on iTunes. He signed with Colombia, who re-released the first “hurricane” of his 14 country radio hits. The next two albums, “This is for you” 2017, and “What you saw, that’s what you got,” It was full of songs that achieved two clever steps: they were both fresh and immediately familiar sounds.
“I always wanted to write a song that I didn’t feel like listening to,” he said. “When I started, everything was a beat or it was really a beach. That’s not a mistake, but when I grew up I really loved artists like Vince Gill and Brooks & Dunn. So when you put things out, you want a live instrument, not a track. “
Combs’ songs are full of classic country symbols, such as beer, tracks, and a gentle admiration for last year’s glory, but are filtered by his own lens. “We know exactly who it is from the first note,” said Miranda Lambert, who collaborated with Combs on “Outrunnin’Your Memory,” a mid-tempo duet for “Growin’Up.”
His music depicts a picture of life that feels rebellious and normal. His 2017 hit, “Bad things overlap,” “$ 100 for a scratch-off ticket,” “the last spot in the Hooters parking lot,” and “three free passes for me and my two companions to play the round” for golf. The most sympathetic line in his monster ballad, “Beautiful Crazy,” is about the purpose of Combs’ affection to abandon his weekend plans and instead fall asleep on the couch while watching TV.
Jon Singleton helped write Combs’ 2019 hits “Beer has never broken my heart.” Any song can suit any artist, as well as the four tracks on the new album, which compares the normal songwriting process in Nashville with Bingo. “Luke’s songs don’t go that way,” said Singleton, who produced “Growin’Up” with Combs and Chip Matthews. “They are very personal. He will put you in. He is a regular man who sings and writes great songs, but he feels like this invincible vulnerable.”
Combs Brand as Midas Touch’s Everyman played in front of the South Army flag in a 2015 music video in early 2021 and his image of an old guitar with the South Army flag sticker on it. Rumbled as it began to recirculate online. This spurred a fierce dialogue over race and racial fairness within the ongoing genre, following the advent of country star Morgan Wallen’s video using racist terms. Combs publicly apologized With its flag-raising appearance, but in the same nasty way Warren’s short rebuke by the country music industry spurred a corresponding boost to his streaming numbers, Combs’ Mare Carpa created its own backlash. rice field.
“Some fans were angry at what I apologized for, and some were happy with me,” he said. “It was a tough time. Before it all fell apart, this happened and it became like,” Hey, you’re a racist. ” I wasn’t such a political person, but I’m not a racist, so it was a big problem for me to be told by someone that I was a racist. “
According to Combs, it was easier to hide the situation without doing anything. But the episode was struck at the center of who he was. “I please people,” he said. “I am the man who draws much of my happiness from making sure others are happy. That is the essence of my work.”
This baseline satisfaction informed his creative process of “Growin’Up”. “Let’s say’This One’s for You’is a record that many people like me fell in love with,” he said. “When I release a completely different album, it feels like,’I bought this grape gatorade and it tastes like lime.’ But I don’t want to release the same record 7 to 8 times.”
One symptom of this modest evolutionary urge is the lack of beer songs on the new album, as both Combs and Singleton pointed out. To be clear, there are still some beers, but Combs’ music has changed with his reality. “I’m in this transition, and I’ve been able to crush 100 beers at the bar tonight and play for five hours.” “I don’t want to get off the couch the other night. I want to hang out with his wife and get ready to give birth to this child.”
Some changes are unavoidable, but according to Singleton, who first met Combs before signing with Colombia, the only major difference he sees in the 2022 edition of Combs is “his bank account.” That is the driving force behind “Do in’This”. This imagines a universe where stardom has escaped Combs, but he’s still playing at a local bar on Friday night. He asked his college companion church (which happens to live in the reality of the sliding doors of the song) to appear in the video of the song.
“I’m still playing in my hometown for the most part,” Church said. “Luke is this huge scale, but if he went to another route like me, he would still be playing music. He’s the same guy at the time.”
He reiterated his friend’s claim as Combs steered his Polaris along a wooded path past a 100-year-old tobacco barn on his property. “I moved to Nashville and thought,’If I could somehow make a living by playing music, that’s enough.'” He wanted to sing, but he calmed down. , Book a band at the bar, anything. “
He ran past his huge man’s cave, his new tour bus, towards his big white house, and stopped. “I wasn’t smart enough to plan all of this in advance,” he said. “I’ve become smart enough not to plunge an airplane into the earth. Well, not yet.”