Luke Combs Opens Up About Missing His Son’s Birth Because Of Aus Tour: “It Sucked”

Opening up to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in a candid interview last Friday (June 21), Luke Combs detailed how hard it was for him when he missed the birth of his second son, Beau.

Combs was on tour in Australia in August last year when his wife, Nicole Combs went into labour.

“I probably woke up at around 8am or something like that, Australia time, and I had a text from my wife and it said, ‘I’m so sorry, I really tried to not have the baby while you’re gone,’… And God, dude, it sucked,” Combs said. Their son arrived two weeks earlier than expected, meaning Combs couldn’t be there in time. “I was supposed to be home and I wasn’t… Obviously we didn’t plan it that way.”

Combs was quite emotional during the interview, crying while explaining that, though he got to see his son’s birth via video chat, it was heartbreaking for him to not be there in person. “That was real hard to do and I haven’t really told anybody that… That was tough, man. That was tough.”

Thankfully, he had his best friends with him on the tour, supporting him through the rough time: “God, it was a hard day, but I’m so lucky that a lot of my closest friends now work for me, so I had a really great support system… It was wild, dude. It was such a surreal thing, you know?”

His wife Nicole wasn’t alone either, with her mother staying with her for the month of tour. “Thank goodness she was there, and my sister-in-law lives in Nashville as well, so my wife had a really great support system with her for that experience, which I’m very thankful for. That made it a lot easier.”

Combs explained that he doesn’t “cover that [day] too much” in his new album Fathers & Sons because “it’s really hard” for him to deal with, describing his son’s day of birth as “one of the best and one of the worst days in my life at the same time.”

“Looking back on it, man, it’s one of those stories that's a defining moment in my life for sure. It sums up, in a lot of ways, some of the bad parts of the music business — the leaving and your schedule’s crazy and you’re travelling all over the place. It’s not like I can drop everything I’m doing and fly 18 hours home.”

This interview comes as the Country Music Hall Of Fame recently announced the launch of a new exhibition detailing the life of Combs.