Fastballs and Fatherhood: Inside Luke Combs’ Nashville Sitdown on Stardom, Songs, and Staying Grounded

Luke Combs walked onto the City Winery Nashville stage like a man who’s played a few small gigs before, if your definition of “a few” includes sold-out stadiums and singalongs loud enough to register on seismographs. But for this night, sitting down with Willie Geist for a live Sunday Sitdown, the two-time CMA Entertainer of the Year traded pyrotechnics for perspective, offering a candid look at the balancing act between global

country superstardom and life at home with a growing family.

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The setting was intimate. The subject is anything but.

In just over a decade, Combs has gone from grinding through the bar circuit to headlining across continents, a rise so fast it still sounds fictional when he tells it. Yet as he prepares to release his sprawling 22-track new album, The Way I Am, and mount a massive U.S. and European tour capped by a three-night stand at London’s Wembley Stadium, Combs isn’t talking about legacy. He’s talking about diapers, group texts, and creative trust.

“This album is just fastballs,” Combs said with a grin. “Just kind of be like — I’ve still got it, a little bit.”

After the more reflective, family-centered tone of his previous project Fathers and Sons, Combs said the new record marks a return to the big, driving sound that first made him a radio and streaming staple. But the process behind it was anything but solitary genius. Instead, it started with a message thread.

“I’ve got a group text with all the people that I usually write with — probably 12 or 14 people,” he explained. “I just said, ‘Hey, I’m getting ready to want to have an album… if you have any ideas, think about me. Holler at your boy.’ I really owe most of this record to my collaborators and my co-writers. They really carried me on this one.”

That collaborative spirit is partly by necessity. Combs is now balancing career velocity with fatherhood. He and his wife Nicole are expecting their third child, and Combs is intentional about structuring his schedule around home life — not the other way around.

“There’s this idea that you can either spend time with your kids or you can work,” he said. “It’s like — no. Selfishly, I’m going to figure out how to do both.”

That means songwriting sessions built around family windows and recording plans flexible enough to accommodate real life. He laughed that he may have missed great takes because he had to step away for parenting duty — and he’s perfectly fine with that trade.

The groundedness tracks with Combs’ larger view of country music’s moment. Once dismissed or narrowly defined, the genre now commands global stages and broad audiences — something he’s watched shift in real time.

“This isn’t a Nashville thing anymore,” Geist observed.

“It’s gotten so big, and I think that’s really cool,” Combs replied. He compared dismissing country music as a whole to rejecting bread entirely. “There’s so many kinds of bread.

What are you talking about? Have you tried the cheese kind? It’s really good.”

His own path into that expanding world started far from Music Row. Raised in Asheville, North Carolina, Combs sang in school and church choirs and attended Appalachian State University — initially with plans to become a homicide detective. Music was constant, but the idea of it as a career came late.

“As crazy as that sounds,” he admitted, “all I did was sing all the time and never one time was I like, maybe I can sing for a living.”

That changed in 2014 when he moved to Nashville and scraped together just enough money to take a shot on a song called “Hurricane.” The now-famous story still sounds like folklore: Combs only had enough cash to properly master one track.

“I had 200 bucks left,” he said. “I was like, I can do one song.”

He chose wisely. “Hurricane” sold 10,000 copies in its first week with no label, no manager, and no machine behind it — momentum that financed the rest of his early recordings and launched one of country music’s most dominant runs of the last decade.

Looking back now, with a shelf of No. 1 hits — from “Beautiful Crazy” to “When It Rains It Pours” — Combs frames his success less as destiny and more as stubborn optimism.

“The no wasn’t no — it was not yet,” he said. “You can’t be afraid to bet on yourself.”

It’s a fitting mantra for an artist whose career has been defined by conviction — in his voice, his songs, and his audience. But on this Nashville night, between acoustic moments and easy laughter, it was clear that Luke Combs’ proudest balancing act isn’t between country and crossover, or past and present.

It’s between the roar of the crowd and the quiet of home and he’s determined to keep both.