Celebrating the release of his new album Gettin’ Old, out today (March 24), country sensation Luke Combs sat down on Today’s Country Radio with Kelleigh Bannen to discuss the record.
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The star dove into certain tracks and discussed the album as a whole, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse inside his long-awaited work.
“It felt like Growin’ Up was the last record .., of what my sound used to be and where it’s kind of evolving to,” he explained of his 2022 release. “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,” he continued. “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.”
He talks about the track “Fox in the Henhouse,” a song he said began as a tune about foxes literally killing his chickens, but what came from it was a song with universal meaning. “We listened to it, we’re like, ‘God, this could be about a litany of [things.’],” he told the radio host. “Someone’s coming after your girl, someone stabbed you in the back, or somebody’s breaking into your house.”
Combs touched on the album’s biggest curveball, a cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” “[It’s] my first favorite song probably ever,” he explained of the 1988 Chapman hit. “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…”
He said he still has the original cassette. “My dad brought it to me a couple years ago” he added. “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 you can get a bunch of cassette tapes for 50 cents.”
He also discussed his most recently dropped song, “5 Leaf Clover.” It was a song born at the tail end of the pandemic when he was trying to work out the logistics of going back on tour.
“I was just riding around my place with my buddy Nudey,” he explained, “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,” he continued. “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.”
Check out “5 Leaf Clover” below, and tune into Today’s Country Radio to hear Combs’ full conversation with Bannen.
(Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
