Luke Combs joins Kelleigh for a special episode of Today’s Country Radio celebrating the release of his new album ‘Gettin’ Old.’ Kelleigh and Luke dive deep into Luke’s songwriting process, balancing life as a new dad, covering a Tracy Chapman classic, and how he wants his music to evolve with his audience.
You can read our five star review of Luke Combs’ new album ‘Gettin’ Old’ right here.
Tune in and listen to the episode in-full this Friday (March 24) at 7am PT / 9am CT / 10am ET or anytime on-demand at apple.co/_TodaysCountry
Luke Combs Tells Apple Music About Having a New Sound on ‘Gettin’ Old’
It felt like ‘Growin’ Up’ was the last record of the tail end of my career at that point of what my sound used to be and where it’s kind of evolving to so that we really did shift our focus production wise as soon as that record came out and we knew we wanted [‘Gettin’ Old’] to sound different… it’s still rooted in what we’ve always done. It’s the same songwriters. It’s just the song ideas and the production are different based on where I’m kind of at in my life right now.
Luke Combs Tells Apple Music About the Origin of the Title for ‘Joe’
So Erik Dylan wrote that song with James Slater and he had sent it to me. Originally it was called “The Bottle.” I was at the Opry, and it was during COVID when I was playing the Opry when nobody was there. It was empty. It was just me and Craig Morgan. [I] sat down and my creative guy, Zack, was there. They were like, “What’s the name of this song or whatever?” He told them it was “The Bottle” and then when I played it, I said it was called “Joe” because I wanted it, I just wanted it to jump off the page. That was just the name that was in the song when Erik Dylan sent it to me. Was like, “I got a job, my name’s Joe.” That was the first line of the song.
Luke Combs Tells Apple Music About ‘Fox in the Henhouse‘
It’s mega swampy. I think when we wrote it, we were thinking, okay, a [Chris] Stapleton/[The] SteelDrivers thing. If you hear the work tape, I think that’s kind of what that song was rooted as when we wrote it. Then two years later we ended up cutting it and it ended up being something completely different… We wrote that song, me and my buddy Dan [Isbell], we both have chickens and foxes were literally killing our chickens. It was literally just about that. Then we listened to it, we’re like, “God, this could be about a litany of [things.”]… Someone’s coming after your girl, someone stabbed you in the back, or somebody’s breaking into your house.
Luke Combs Tells Apple Music Why He Released His Own Version of ‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman
[It’s] my first favorite song probably ever. I remember listening to that song with my dad in his truck when I was probably four. He had a cassette, a tape of it, and we had this old brown camper top F-150… We rode around that thing and he had a tape cassette player in there, and I have the original cassette — my dad brought it to me a couple years ago… I have the one and I have it in my shop. The only music I have in my shop is a cassette player. I love to go to antique stores and just you can get a bunch of cassette tapes for 50 cents and some of the best records of all time are on cassette.
Luke Combs Tells Apple Music About ‘5 Leaf Clover’
That came to be kind of, I guess kind of the tail end of COVID. We were talking about trying to figure out how we were going to go back on tour. This is probably spring 2021 I would think. We ended up going out in the fall. I was just riding around my place with my buddy Nudey and I have a clover field up on this hill and I just started looking around for four-leaf clovers and I found one and I was like, oh man, that’s cool to find one. Then Nudey found a five-leaf clover… I have a picture of it on my phone. The actual one he found that day. Because I was like, “Man, that’s cool.” I’ve never seen that before. I just wrote “5 Leaf Clover” in my phone because I was like, “Man, how lucky do you have to be to find a five-leaf clover?”… I think to me, country music sometimes is people that listen to it, they want to hear songs about loving the life that they have and so I think, I hope we accomplished that that day with that song.
