River House Artists/Columbia NashvilleLuke Combs wrote his latest top-ten hit, “One Number Away,” shortly after relocating to Music City from North Carolina. His bandleader Rob Williford unknowingly set things in motion, by introducing him to co-writers Sammy Mitchell and Steven Battey.
“I had just moved to town,” Luke recalls, “and Rob kind of introduced me to them to sing some demos for those guys. And so I came in and sang some demos for them, and we sat down and we were like, ‘Hey, man, we should try to write something.'”
“So we wrote once, and wrote a good song. And then the second time, we wrote, we got on ‘One Number Away.'”
For Luke, the writing process for his current hit was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before.
“Rob had had the idea in his phone,” Luke explains. “And Steven is just an incredible melody guy. So he was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got this melody thing that I really like.’ And he started humming that chorus of the song. And so we just kind of sat there, and Steven had this cool chorus melody and Sammy built the track.”
“I had never written with a ‘track guy,'” Luke points out. “I didn’t know that was a thing. It actually turned out being pretty cool, and it ended up becoming one of my favorite songs on the record.”
Luke’s two previous singles, “Hurricane” and “When It Rains It Pours,” have both gone to #1. The deluxe re-issue of his debut album, titled This One’s for You Too, is due June 1.
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