Luke Combs Once Turned Down A $5000 Offer For A Meet And Greet

Luke Combs continues to be the undisputed man of the people, with him and his team revealing they turned down a $5000 offer from a banker for a meet and greet.

With Combs’ long-time manager, Kappy, stating, “That’s not the type of people we want. I’d rather have the guy who can barely afford to come to the show because that’s more of a real fan than you wanting a picture with Luke for your Instagram.”

In a recent interview with Billboard, the hitmaker shared, “I always want my fans to understand that I’ve never made any decisions based off how much money I can get out of them. It already costs so much to do anything, right? I want them to love the music and feel like they saw a great show that someone put a lot of f–king thought into and did it at a price that was affordable to them.”

“I’ve always just felt really weird about, like, charging people to meet me,” he continued. “Maybe that’s just me feeling like, ‘Well, it’s not worth it.’ I just want to meet people who came to the show, whether it’s their first show or their 50th show. It’s people who would have never gotten the chance to meet me or could never have afforded it. Because I couldn’t have afforded that growing up.”

By making meet-and-greets almost completely random (25 fans are chosen per show through a lottery on Combs’ site), Combs gets to see “a real representation of who’s there,” as he puts it.

Combs will tour Australia this August. He will take the stage in Brisbane Entertainment Centre on August 11 and 12, Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena on August 16 and 17, Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena on August 19 and 20, Adelaide’s AEC Arena on August 23, and RAC Arena in Perth on August 26, delivering his explosive live show to Australian fans for the first time since his sold out 2019 headline shows. Meet-and-greet opportunities for all Australian shows are available through his website.

Recently Combs also spoke about the most challenging shifts of his life – being in the spotlight, staying true to his roots, maintaining some aspect of privacy, plus marriage and children. He and his wife of two years, Nicole Hocking share 9-month-old Tex and have a second boy due in September.

“I think what has been one of my biggest assets has also been one of the things that was the hardest for me,” Combs says of his ‘regular guy’ exterior. “I am just me. There’s not, like, an act. My driver license says ‘Luke Combs’ on it. I’m 300 pounds with a neck beard. I can’t go out and not wear a hat and people don’t know who I am. I struggled with [fame] a lot because I almost felt trapped, like a zoo animal or something. Now I don’t even think about it anymore.”

“I think I’m finally at peace with it now,” Combs elaborated with Esquire. “It was tough for a few years—feeling like you couldn’t go anywhere, like you couldn’t do anything. That’s kind of going away. I just live my life, I go to the grocery store and go out to eat and whatever. I used to not even do that stuff, because it was overwhelming—it always felt like somebody was looking at you or watching you or something. But now I honestly forget about that whole part of it.”

Combs dropped his fourth studio album, Getting’ Old on Friday, March 24. The 18-track collection is a follow-up to his companion album, Growin’ Up, released in June 2022. Combs recorded Growin' Up and Gettin' Old together but decided to release them as two separate companion albums.

“It became apparent that there were two markedly different groups of songs that were showing up,” he said. “Growin’ Up leaned more towards my first two albums and Gettin’ Old is a shift towards a more mature sound, with being married and having a kid and things that were happening at the time I was writing the songs. It felt like there was this big juxtaposition in my life—you're out on the road playing shows and drinking with your buddies, and then you're home and your wife's pregnant, and then you got a kid, and then you're back on the road, playing shows and riding on the bus. There's things I really love about both of those, so that juxtaposition is kind of where the songs came from.”

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