November 7, 2019
Luke Combs: Assets to support the release of new album, What You See Is What You Get on Friday 11/8
Luke Combs: Assets to support the release of new album, What You See Is What You Get on Friday 11/8
Friendly reminder: All content regarding unreleased music is to remain embargoed until What You See Is What You Get is out THIS Friday 11/8. We thank you for your continued support!
The most exciting part about releasing new music for me is, I mean, is just that. You know, it’s getting to put something new out for people to hear and I think people have been wanting a new album from us for a while now. So, it’s definitely overdue. I’m just excited for people to get to hear it and see what they think is the most excited thing for me and then obviously getting to play new stuff every night is a huge of that as well.
“What You See Is What You Get” Cut x Cut Audio
“1, 2 Many” was an idea I’d had in my phone for a while. My and my stage-left guitar player Tyler King wrote that chorus probably 4 years ago in my first apartment that I lived in in Nashville. I tried to write the verses with a couple different folks, and nothing really ever came of it. I couldn’t really find a direction that I liked or a melody that I loved. I really did struggle with it for a while, and a couple buddies of mine were out writing on the road, Dan Isbell and Drew Parker. And I said, “Hey, I’ve had this thing forever, let’s try to take a stab at it.” We started working on the verses and finally came up with a melody that we liked. I think I went in to play the show, and then I come back and they’re like, “Oh man.” They had just put in a ton of work on the song by the time I got back and I guess they probably had it 3 quarters of the way done by the time I got back. It was just really going in the right direction, and we polished it off that night and, you know, that’s it.
“Blue Collar Boys” I wrote that with Ray Fulcher and Erik Dylan. You know, all 3 of us come from pretty humble, middle class, “blue collar” for lack of a better term, upbringing, and we just wanted to focus on that. The people that turn the gears on things that most of us take for granted, whether it’s farming or factory-working or whatever these hard-working folks do, and put a song out about those guys and those folks and how important they are to all of us.
“New Every Day,” I wrote that song with Josh Thompson, great guy, and again Mr. Ray Fulcher makes another appearance. And it was one of those things where I’d had that title for a while, and we got the chorus done. We wrote it over at Big Machine Music, where my publishing’s at. We were upstairs in this little attic room, and it’s one of those things that if anybody out there has written with Josh, you know sometimes he can just come in with something and you’re just like- He’ll be like, “What do you think about this thing?” And that’s just like a whole verse to the song. We had busted for a couple hours from finishing that chorus and getting the first verse right- and I mean literally me and Ray went and like used the bathroom and came back and Josh was like, “What do you think about this for the second verse?” And we’re like, “Yeah, ok, that’s it.” It was just one of those things where he just has this thing where he can really tap into what you’re doing. He’s the best, and I mean it was a great day.
“Reasons,” I wrote that in the fire hall at Sony/ATV with James McNair and Ray Fulcher. I think that was a Ray title he had had for a while just about a guy who’s gotten left for what he feels like is no reason at all, and he’s kind of trying to figure out why he’s been kicked to the curb and not really having an answer for it.
“Every Little Bit Helps,” wrote that in the writing room in my house with Chase McGill and James McNair. Chase is a great guy, and I’ve been writing with James for a long time. Chase has really just come into the fold recently, man he has a lot of hits with a lot of other folks, and he’s just a great guy. We just had a lot of fun with that song. We went in, and it was just one of those songs that was really fun to write. I guess it’s another one of those upbeat- Like it’s a breakup song, but unless you’re really paying attention to it, it definitely doesn’t feel like a breakup song.
Well “Dear Today” is interesting. I wrote that song on the road with Erik Dylan and Rob Snyder, and we were in a hotel room in Huntington Beach, California, kind of in between show days. I had played a radio show, and I think we were like a day in between, kind of the end of the Aldean tour. So my manager drove us in a rental car from like the middle of California to Huntington Beach. We were sitting in there trying to write something, cause we really didn’t have anything going on. Man we toyed around with a couple of different things that day and didn’t really land on anything that we loved. We had started writing this thing and we didn’t know where we were going with it. I had this idea, I was like- You know, the whole letter thing has been done before, it’s not a super original idea or anything. I was like, “Man, no one’s ever done writing a letter from your future self to your current self.” It’s always like, “If you could write a letter to your younger self, what you say?” That’s kind of the thing, and I had never heard it done the other way, so we thought that would be unique and cool. I had just been really busy and stressed out with the kind of ascent from relative obscurity to like, fame all of a sudden was pretty wild. I just wanted to keep myself in check and remind myself to call my parents when I need to do that. That song, it was the original work tape, so when you hear the production on the album, it’s sounds really thin and puny-sounding at the beginning. That’s literally the tape that I recorded on my iPhone the day we wrote it in the hotel room. And then Scott [Moffatt] brings the band when the second verse starts, and over the course of the song finishing it goes and merges back to the original work tape, which is something that took a lot of work I think to be able to nail down production-wise. And it’s one of my favorite moments on the album. It’s really different from anything that I’ve heard. And I know people have released work tapes before, but I had never heard it kind of spliced in like that, like the original thing. It wasn’t like we went in and I played acoustic and sang, it was literally from the iPhone to the studio back to the iPhone.
“What You See Is What You Get,” I wrote that with Jonathan Singleton and Barry Dean in Jonathan’s room at Big Machine Music. I had never written with Barry before. He’s an awesome guy, I really liked him a lot man. It was fun that day, we went in and I had had this idea for a while and was really headstrong about- I want to write this song, and I want to write this idea, and I want it to be different. I really just wanted to get out, “Hey, you know I’m this, but I’m also that.” Like the juxtaposition between “I can be this way, but I can also be that way” I think is a cool twist on the idea of- “What You See Is What You Get” is such a concrete thing, but it’s not always that simple either, you know what I mean? Outside appearances are not always the same as the way you feel inside. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t know if the song necessarily goes that deep, but that was what I wanted to get across on that song is that you can be multifaceted but also be the thing that everybody thinks you are too.
“Does To Me” is a great song. I wrote it with Tyler Reeve and Ray Fulcher. I wrote it over at Tyler’s pub company I believe, and we went in there and wrote it. Man it was a fun song. That’s another thing is I did just have a really regular childhood. My parents have been married for 30-something-odd years. We always had enough to eat and a roof over our head, but that definitely doesn’t mean that my parents weren’t struggling for money. They just did a really good job of living within their means and being the parents that they should be. And so we kind of used that sentiment of like- The song is a lot of really run-of-the-mill things that aren’t really exciting to anybody other than yourself, and things that I guess the world doesn’t think of as like really awesome achievements. But they’re still things that you should be proud of and things that you should be able to say with confidence and say, “Hey, I did that. Maybe it’s not winning the gold medal at the Olympics, but I’m proud of it. I’m proud that I did that, and it might not mean anything to anybody else but it means something to me.” And I think Eric Church was an obvious choice when it came to finding somebody to do that song with. Not only does I feel like it fits his writing style, but also his mentality, his approach to music, I think it was just a really good fit.
“Angels Workin’ Overtime,” fun song. I wrote that with an old friend of mine, Mr. Josh Phillips, who writes in town and does an artist thing. I’ve known him back to my North Carolina days. I wrote it with him and Josh Thompson, fun song. I had that title for a while, and by that- When you’re in your 20’s you’re kind of stuck in between being a college kid and working that grown up job and doing those things that society kind of always wants you to do, and sometimes your parents are like, “Man, how do you do that? How do you go to work every day and then go out and go to the bar and still raise hell with your friends and be able to wake up and go to work in the morning and kind of keep it together?” It’s definitely a thin line, for sure. And that was kind of the explanation I guess is just there’s somebody looking out for me that’s working a lot harder than I am to make sure that I don’t fall over in the middle of all this stuff.
“All Over Again” I wrote with Ray Fulcher and Corey Crowder. Man, just a fun song about that classic theme, I feel like it kind of runs parallel to “Hurricane” at times. It’s kind of that song about this person you can’t get over, and maybe you’re both not good for each other and you both shouldn’t be together, but you keep coming back to each other anyways and you always kind of end up with the same result.
“Nothing Like You” is a song I wrote with Drew Parker and Rob Williford. Man, we must’ve written that song 8 different times, and we had all the pieces there but we just couldn’t figure out how to get them in the right places. I was travelling a lot at that point when we started that song, and I had just met Nicole, and everything was crazy. It was like I’m constantly here and I’m constantly there, and she was working a full-time job so she couldn’t be on the road. I had went all these places and done all these things but nothing was like- I always looked forward to coming home and being able to spend time with her, and the whole sentiment of the song is there’s just nothing out there in the world that’s like coming back home to her.
I wrote “Better Together” in the mountains of North Carolina about three years ago, two and a half years ago maybe. I wrote it with Dan Isbell and Randy Montana, we started it there. I put a little clip of it on my Instagram maybe a year and a half or two years ago, I’m not exactly sure, but people had always loved it. We ended up recording it and going with you know, kind of a very stripped down production of just me and a piano, and I couldn’t be happier with the way it turned out.
What You See Is What You Get Track Intro/Outro Audio
