![]() ![]() “There wasn’t a genre he couldn’t do - anything from Al Green to John Prine to T-Pain,” says Harper, adding that Combs would occasionally show off his vocal chops at parties in high school to impress girls. So how exactly did an anxiety-ridden Everyman from Asheville, North Carolina, elevate himself to the superstar echelon of the competitive country world? To find out, Vulture spoke with more than a dozen people in Combs’s orbit, including the man himself, to uncover the path he took to the country-music-dominating present.Ĭombs, as his childhood best friend, now assistant, Austin Harper, says, “had a gift” from an early age: The dude could sing. It honestly still doesn’t even really feel real.” I always knew I’d put in the work because I love what I do, but I still never expected anything like this, especially this fast. “I thought my team was crazy when they started talking about playing football stadiums, but to see them sell out just reminds me all of my success is happening because of my fans,” he says about his run of shows this summer. He delivers in the live show, he delivers hit after hit after hit for streaming and radio, and he’s a quality guy that people can root for.”Įven Combs is still shocked and humbled by his ascent. Adds Ed Warm, a top Chicago-based country-music promoter who booked the singer early in his career, “I’m not surprised at all by Luke’s rise. “I think we all need to just step back and go, Wow, this is like a once-in-a-generation thing that’s happening,” says Combs’s longtime tour manager, Ethan Strunk. (“Please don’t give me the credit for that one,” Tannenbaum insists with a laugh.) And in the five years since his agent, WME’s Aaron Tannenbaum, began booking Combs’s shows, the singer has sold out every one of them. In fact, he has yet to release a single that hasn’t topped the Billboard Country Airplay charts. 1 singles to date, including his latest, “Doin’ This,” off his just-released third album, Growin’ Up. Or as one of his main collaborators, best friends, and hunting buddies, Dan Isbell, succinctly tells me, “Everybody around Luke will take a bullet for him.”Ĭombs is unquestionably one of the biggest acts in the country genre today, with a record-breaking 14 No. Talk to enough people around Combs - those who work with the 32-year-old singer or, really, anyone who has interacted with him in some capacity - and a clear picture emerges: namely, that of an uncharacteristically humble, down-to-earth, hardworking, fiercely loyal teddy bear of a country star. ![]() “I think there’s something really organic in the law of attraction that works in his favor.” “And that’s when we really became best friends, like the movie Step Brothers,” says Williford, who has been a guitarist in Combs’s band and one of his closest musical confidants ever since. Two weeks later, after bonding with the then-unknown Combs over a mutual affection for the singer-songwriter Eric Church, Williford reluctantly agreed to work with him - and quickly discovered a young man not only blessed with a stronger voice than he initially gave him credit for but a unique way with words. Wanting to do his former teacher a solid, though, he decided to take the meeting. ![]() And I’m sure he thought I was an asshole.” “Basically, I felt like, Man, you’re an incredible singer, but you’re like a karaoke singer. I’m a bona fide songwriter,” Williford recalls. “I’m thinking, I can’t be bothered with this. Yet when Rob Williford, a singer-songwriter in Nashville, received a call from his high-school science teacher, Lenora Crabtree, to potentially collaborate with a wannabe country- music singer her son was roommates with at Appalachian State University, he balked. This doesn’t happen often because, well, by and large everyone who meets Luke Combs immediately loves Luke Combs. ![]() In 2014, Luke Combs had a rare but pivotal encounter: He met someone who didn’t like him. “It was like, ‘This guy? Take one look at him. “I always felt overlooked or written off before anyone had even given me a shot,” Combs says. ![]()
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