‘Off the Record’ Episode 11: Luke Grimes Reveals How His Sophomore Album Helped Him Find “Catharsis” Amid a Season of Change

Luke Grimes is back with new music. The actor, songwriter, and musician just released Red Bird, his sophomore LP that builds on the honesty and vulnerability that he began to uncover on his self-titled debut.

The album, Grimes told host Lisa Konicki on American Songwriter’s Off the Record podcast, “is a little all over the place,” something that reflects many people’s lives. As he was making the album, Grimes was feeling that way, largely due to his role as a new dad.

“It’s all the stuff, right? It’s profound. Like, the greatest thing, the hardest thing, the funniest thing,” Grimes said. “… Him experiencing everything for the first time sort of makes me just feel so lucky and happy to be alive again in a way that I hadn’t felt in a while.”

At the same time, fatherhood meant there was “a lot of change” for the Marshals actor.

“There’s a lot of love in my life and then there’s a lot of loss,” he said. “And there was still some immature man in there who didn’t quite know how to deal with it perfectly.”

One such loss was that of Grimes’ dad’s death, which “had a huge effect” on his music.

“Losing a parent is one of the more profound things that you’ll go through. It’s really hard,” he said. “… It kind of messes with your head quite a bit. You think about your own mortality for the first time in a way that you hadn’t before. You realize that’s very real now.”

Luke Grimes Reveals How His Two LPs Differ

With that in mind, Grimes envisioned the album as “this snapshot of all the things that I was going through.”

“The way that we went about accomplishing that was really different and a very different process than anything I’d seen or had done on my first album,” Grimes said of his freshman LP, which was released in 2024.

“The first one, I was learning the ropes,” he said. “I was out here for the first time, basically just trying to get collections of songs that I liked and there was no idea about an album.”

“I didn’t understand how you could actually have a collection of songs that were attached in some way,” Grimes added. “So I feel like the first one is a little more detached and was just sort of an exercise in writing songs that I thought were cool and having no real plan.”

Not only was the process different, but the songs that came out of it are too.

“It wasn’t quite as intense as this one, and I wasn’t a good enough writer or performer yet to be as honest as I am on the second one,” he said. “I didn’t know how to tell the truth in the same way.”

The result of all that honesty is one that Grimes is proud to share with the world.

“I think obviously, selfishly, there was some catharsis for me. It was part of the reason to make it,” he said, before noting that he wants listeners to “find that catharsis” for themselves.

“Don’t be afraid to share what’s going on with yourself. Don’t be afraid to be honest,” he said. “We could use a lot of that right now. I think we’d all feel a little bit better if we were all a little more honest and we’d all feel a little less scared or less than, because we’d know that we’re all more similar than we think that we are.”