Luke Bryan is not ready to slow down anytime soon. Still, after celebrating his 50th birthday in July, Bryan is becoming more aware of what he wants his future in country music to look like.
“I just turned 50,” Bryan says on Apple Music‘s The Kelleigh Bannen Show. “I want to try to not all the way look 50, and I want to try to all the way not sing 50 and act 50. But I also want to be a realist, too. I’ve been lucky enough to do this for almost 20 years now. When great songs land in my lap or land in my email, or in my text messages, and I get to hear them and record them, I still get really excited about that.
“I think I’m still really having a great time in all this,” he adds. “That’s the main thing. If I wake up and for some reason the mojo ain’t right with going on the road, and the mojo ain’t right with shows and songs, and I feel like I’m swinging and missing a lot, for whatever reasons, I’ll hopefully be able to recognize that.”
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Luke Bryan’s 9th Studio Album, ‘Signs’
Bryan just released Signs, his ninth studio album. The record includes two singles, both his “Country and She Knows It” and “Finders Keepers,” his duet with Luke Combs. Signs comes 19 years after Bryan released his debut I’ll Stay Me project in 2007.
“Every album has its own little things that happen throughout the making of it that you look back, and you’re like, ‘Wow,’” Bryan explains on TalkShopLive. “They all come together very, very differently, at different times. I’ve got songs on this album that we’ve had literally on hold for years that I’m finally glad I got around to recording. And then we have some other fun stories about some of the songs on there.”
With so much time as a hitmaker in country music, the Georgia native has learned what does and doesn’t work for him on his records.
“I look at this album, I’ve got sad songs, the love songs, the heartbreak songs,” Bryan boasts. “I’ve got the good ol’ classic fun ones too. I think when you look at singling ‘Country and She Knows It’ right off the bat, it’s kind of what my bread is buttered, singing songs that girls just want to get out and dance to.”
The Story Behind “Finders Keepers” by Luke Bryan and Luke Combs
Bryan later admits that he had no idea he was going to record “Finders Keepers,” a song written by Jimi Bell, Beau Bailey, and Sam Ellis.
“Well, when I heard the song, it was the first time in my career where I took a song that I heard while in a studio session,” Bryan reveals on SiriusXM‘s The Highway. “I went into the recording session without having heard this song. We were going to lunch break, and my manager played it. On the way to lunch, I listened to the song like ten times, and I just said, ‘Heck with it,’ and recorded it, which historically has been like a no-no. Historically, it’s good for me to get a song [and] live with it.”
However, for “Finders Keepers,” Bryan threw caution to the wind, recording it almost immediately after hearing the song.
“I went in and sang the vocal, and then I was like, I didn’t have kind of a collab or any ideas on the album yet,” Bryan recalls. “And I just texted over to Luke. I did the whole thing like, ‘Man, obviously no pressure, but just wanted to get your read on this.’ And he goes, ‘I’m in.’”