If there’s one thing Luke Combs no longer needs to worry about, it’s money. The singer, who has had seven consecutive No. 1 singles, sold-out tours, and a platinum-selling debut album, is raking in big bucks thanks to his success, using much of it to help his parents live out their dreams.
“My parents are super proud,” Combs told Willie Geist on Sunday Today. “Not everybody comes from the same situation, but my parents didn’t have a lot of money. Obviously financially I’ve gotten to help them out a lot, and so that’s been great. To see them be able to go travel, and experience things they’ve always wanted to do –– getting to watch them do things is the whole reason I do it.
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“I don’t do it for me,” he continued. “Some of my best friends in the band, and just people who are good people, getting to watch them live their dreams while I live my dream, you can’t beat that.”
It’s fitting that Combs helps his parents out, since he likely wouldn’t even be in the music business, if not for some gentle encouragement from his mother.
“I was working a job at a go-cart place in Asheville, where I worked in high school,” the North Carolina native recalled. “I’d just go to work, go home. I was sitting there like, ‘Man, I don’t have anything to do.’ My mom was like, ‘Well, you know Kenny Chesney, he didn’t learn to play guitar until he was 21.’ I was 21 at the time. I was like, ‘Oh, if that guy can do it, then I can do it.’”
Combs ultimately left college, where he was studying Criminal Justice, to pursue music full-time, getting his big break when he was precariously close to running out of money.
“I didn’t have a job. I was just writing songs every day, for seven or eight months,” Combs recalled. “I was down to my last 200 bucks, and my producer Scott [Moffatt] was like, ‘Hey man, we’ve gotta master these songs.’ I said, ‘Listen, this song ‘Hurricane’ is the only song that we could possibly use the vocal on, and put out.’ So I spent my last 200 bucks, mastered that. Sold 15,000 copies the first week.”
Photo Credit: Getty / Steven Ferdman
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