Luke Combs’ highly anticipated new album “Growin’ Up” is out now, and it’s home to superstar collaboration “Outrunnin’ Your Memory” with Miranda Lambert.
The pair co-wrote and perform the song together. Combs gushed over the opportunity to work with the Academy of Country Music’s reigning Entertainer of the Year.
“I’ve always been a big fan of (Miranda’s) songwriting, and what she does as an artist I think is just really unique and really, really just great,” Combs told Audacy’s Katie Neal.
He doesn’t remember how the songwriting session came together, but they knew what they wanted to do after it did.
“It was never like, ‘Hey, let’s write a song for your album’ or ‘let’s write a song for my album,’ or a duet,” Combs said. “We wanted to write a great song, and we did. When I went in to cut it, I thought, ‘How do we not have her on this thing?’ I asked, and luckily, she said ‘Yes!’”
“Outrunnin’ Your Memory” is an undeniably country mid-tempo about trying to escape a painful heartbreak. It shares space on the album with Combs’ current soulful single, “The Kind of Love We Make.”
“Some of the things that really shaped my singing or taught me how to sing early on — it was Vince Gill and Clint Black and Garth (Brooks) and stuff like that,” Combs said. “As I got to be 10, 11, 12, it was more like Boyz II Men, Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC kind of thing, that’s just what kids my age were listening to. When I heard the melody to this song that they had started working on, I was immediately drawn to it. It was some of the first things that drew me into singing because I just loved those melodies so much, and I think that’s why I fell in love with this song and wanted to finish it with those guys.”
As for the album’s title, Combs said he called it “Growin’ Up” because he feels that’s where he is in his life.
“I’m kind of in this in-between in my life,” he said. “It feels very transitional from being a young adult, kid, combo thing, to since COVID happened, it’s like (I’m) married, (I have a kid), my job is obviously bigger and crazier than it’s ever been. So many things have happened so fast … I feel like I’m going from one thing and moving into the next thing, and I wanted it to feel like that from a production standpoint.”
