Luke Combs Actually Stopped Listening to Country for a While as a Kid
Luke Combs might be the quintessential rising country star now, but he wasn't always a country boy through and through. Backstage at the 2018 ACM Awards, the singer admitted that there were a few years where he stopped listening to country music -- though not really through any fault of his own.
"I've been singing, man, ever since I could talk," Combs tells WYRK's Liz Mantel and Clay Moden. "Vince Gill was what I started singing," he adds, rattling off a laundry list of '90s country stars who influenced him in his early childhood: "Brooks & Dunn, Clint Black -- that was my favorite stuff to sing when I was little, burning up the cassette tapes."
However, Combs' exposure to country music came to an abrupt halt when he was still a young boy: "My parents, for whatever reason, stopped listing to country music when I was 8," he recalls, right around the time the family moved from Charlotte to Asheville, N.C. And it took Combs about a decade to get back into the genre.
"I didn't get back into country music until I found Eric Church when I was 18 years old, a freshman at Appalachian State," Combs says. A buddy at school shared the music of Church -- then a rising country star himself -- with Combs, who says the now-superstar redefined his idea of country music.
In June, Luke Combs will release his first-ever deluxe album, an updated version of his major-label debut disc, now titled This One's for You Too, with five new tracks.
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