Luke Combs is cutting back on his formerly rigorous touring schedule, for two really good reasons: his sons Tex and Beau. Combs reveals his first priority right now is to be a father, more than spending much of the year on the road.
“We’re only doing festivals this year,” Combs reveals to People “We got 20-something shows this year. I’ve already done ten of them. I got 14 more shows for the rest of the whole year. I want to be home with my kids. I want to see my kids grow up and I want them to know that they’re important to me.”
Combs has earned the right to take some much-needed time off. It’s the payoff for spending so many years away from home, even missing the birth of Beau on August 15, 2023, because he was in Australia.
“I feel like country music for a long time has been, ‘Let’s tour every year as hard as we can tour’ while it’s hot,” Combs says. “But I’m now like, ‘Why can’t you tour really hard, build a really great fan base, care about them, support them, give them exclusive things, give them great experiences and let them understand that you care about them,’ and then if you do want some time for you, you can tell them, ‘I can’t tour this year.’ I wanted to get to the point where I could do that, and it not be career suicide.”
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Combs says his sons likely don’t even know that their father is famous, which is exactly what he wants. The North Carolina native is determined that his children, whom he shares with his wife Nicole, will have as normal of a childhood as his career will allow.
“I want my kids’ childhood to feel as normal as it can, given the very strange circumstances that it will ultimately become,” Combs shares on the MeatEater podcast (via Country Now). “That’s a choice you have to make. And you lose a lot of things with that in the sense of like, there’s so many cool opportunities that I have that maybe would be really, not really beneficial, but cool experiences or beneficial to my career that I pass on to do that for my kids.”
“It’s not something I’m bragging [about], like ‘I’m such a good dad,’” he adds. “It’s not that. It’s just, I say this all the time, but my kids didn’t ask to be born. It was my choice to bring them into the world. So to me, it’s my duty.”
Combs is also working on a brand-new album, the follow-up to his Fathers & Sons record, released last year.
“I want to go back and just do the stuff that people probably have been missing for a little bit,” Combs says. “I want to get back to some fun stuff. It’s not going to be nothing weird. We’re not doing no jazz album. We’re just doing a kick-ass country record.”
Find all of Combs’ music and upcoming shows at LukeCombs.com.