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“Can’t Be Afraid To Bet On Yourself”: Luke Combs Spent His Last $200 To Have “Hurricane” Mastered When He First Moved To Nashville
The best $200 he ever spent. This weekend, Luke Combs sat down with Today’s Willie Geist for a feature on Sunday Sitdown, and he of course talked about his new album, The Way I Am, as well as his humble roots and his incredible journey to country music superstardom.
Many of you probably know the story, that Luke moved to Nashville in 2014, and released his now hit song “Hurricane” in 2015, when it initially charted and it gained traction on iTunes organically. A year later, in 2016, Luke’s label re-released it and in 2017, “Hurricane” peaked at the top of the Billboard Country Airplay chart, becoming his first #1 single. It kicked off a run of around 20 straight #1 singles at country radio.
But when he first started college at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, Luke had dreams to be a homicide detective, and he joked that he would have “nailed” the donut part:
“That would be interesting… I would have nailed the donut part, for sure. I would have nailed that part.”
He went onto explain that it took him a surprisingly long time to decide and pursue music as more than just a fun hobby, and he says he still “kicks himself” over how long it took him to come to that realization:
“You know, no. As crazy as that sounds. And I’ve kicked myself all the time, like, how did I not put this together sooner, you know? All I did was sing all the time, and never one time was I like, maybe I can sing for a living.”
His parents always encouraged him to chase his dreams and enjoyed his singing, but of course, they never could have imagined what his pure talent would catapult him into in terms of him becoming one of the premiere mainstream country artists alive.
But the story of how his first hit “Hurricane” came to be is really something… Combs wrote it in December of 2014, and he had done the vocals, mixed it, and was ready to put it out… the only problem was, he still needed to get it mastered (basically, the final step to make sure a song is “polished” and sounds perfect before it gets released), and he didn’t even know that was, much less how much it would cost.
His friend Scott was producing the music then, and he told him it would be $200 to have it mastered… and Combs was down to his last $200:
“I wrote that in December of that year. Went to Nashville, I record the songs, I sing the track and vocal, sing the vocal, mix it, and then I hit my buddy Scott up who was producing my stuff at the time, and I’m like, ‘Hey man, let’s release these songs.’
And he’s like, ‘Well, we’ve got to master all the songs.’ And I’m like, ‘One, what is that? Two, how much does it cost?’ He’s like, ‘$200 a song.’ ‘$200 a song? What does it… does it make it spit out a gold bar at the end? $200? I had $200 left, I’m like, ‘I can do one song.'”
He took the chance, and “Hurricane” ended up selling 10,000 copies the first week, which was incredibly impressive considering he had no record deal, manager, or anything of that kind at that moment.
Combs joked that the song did, in fact, end up spitting out a gold bar in the end:
“So I spent $200 to do ‘Hurricane,’ put it out, it sells 10,000 copies the first week. No deal, no manager, no nothing going on.
Use that money to master the rest of the songs, record the rest of the album, meet my manager, use the album to then get a record deal. Here we are. It did spit out a gold bar at the end, actually. It really did.”
He boiled the success of that risk down to the fact that he was willing to be on himself, and encouraged others to do the same. Even when it seems truly impossible, “it can happen,” and Combs says he living proof of it:
“You can’t be afraid to bet on yourself. Because when it came to my career, and I wish more so in my personal life, I was always a glass half full guy. So the no wasn’t no, it was not yet. So it was always just striving to be better.
And it can happen, man, like, I’m proof positive that it can happen. The goal is not the distention, it ‘s the journey. Getting there is the fun part, so just enjoy it.”
These days, he sells out stadiums all over the world, and has nearly 20 #1 hits at country radio. Luke is truly one of the biggest music stars on the planet right now, and it all happened because he spent his last $200 on a great song called “Hurricane.”
Maybe in some ways to him at the time, it felt like a small risk considering the (very, very tiny) chance that the impossible could happen, though I have to imagine never thought it could get this big… he’s always had the talent, and it sounds like he had the audacity to match it.
Here’s the full video… it’s all much funnier to hear it coming from Luke:
Turn it up…
“Hurricane”
The post “Can’t Be Afraid To Bet On Yourself”: Luke Combs Spent His Last $200 To Have “Hurricane” Mastered When He First Moved To Nashville first appeared on Whiskey Riff.
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