After sharing his quarantine anthem “Six Feet Apart” last year, Luke Combs has returned with another timely new song, surprise-releasing “The Great Divide” with bluegrass guitarist Billy Strings on Sunday night. Written by Combs, Strings, and Wyatt Durrette in June 2020, “The Great Divide” is an ominous yet optimistic call for people with different beliefs to learn to come together.
“Striking matches on the TV / Setting fires on our phones,” Combs begins, as guitar and mandolin underscore his descriptions of civil unrest. “We’re all so far, so far apart now / It’s as deep as it is wide,” the chorus reads. “We’re about to fall apart now / If we can’t reach the other side / We gotta find a way across the great divide.” Along with Strings, Charlie Worsham plays mandolin and banjo on the song, which is a tonal shift for mainstream country star Combs.
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On Instagram, the singer told fans that “The Great Divide” was intended to be part of a bluegrass album that he was working on, a project that has since been shelved. In his caption, Combs wrote that his new song “isn’t meant to be political or try and tell you what to think or believe; that’s not my job. It’s just me saying how I felt when I wrote it and I wanted y’all to hear it.”
“This is a song that was supposed to be a part of that project. It’s not a lead single or a lead-in to that project yet, because that is not done. But it felt like the right time to put this song out,” he added in a statement, via Rolling Stone. “When we wrote it, there were a lot of crazy things going on in the world. There’s still a lot of crazy things going on in the world. And I just felt like I had some stuff to say. It’s not meant to be political. It’s not meant to try and tell you what to think or tell you how to believe. That’s not my job. It’s just a guy kinda saying the way he was feeling when he wrote it.”
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The 30-year-old is now working on his third studio album, which will follow his sophomore effort, 2019’s What You See Is What You Get. Combs released the deluxe version of that project, What You See Ain’t Always What You Get, in October. In January, he extended his record-breaking streak of consecutive No. 1 hits to start a career to 10, when his latest single, “Better Together,” topped the charts.
