Luke Combs Says He Has '40 To 50' Songs Ready For A New Album

It hasn’t even been a year since Luke Combs released his fifth album, Fathers & Sons, and yet, he’s somehow found the time amongst a massive touring schedule to think of album #6.

Combs revealed that he’s already written “forty to fifty” songs that could go on his upcoming album. In a new interview on the MeatEater podcast, the singer-songwriter discussed new music, stadium shows, his life as a father, and more.

However, when Steve Rinella and co. asked him what was next in his career, we doubted they had expected his answer.

“I’m at the point now, I’m about to go in the studio for the first session on cutting my next record,” Combs said. “So, I’m trying to cut probably, anywhere from, like, in a worst-case scenario, four or best-case, six… I would say right now, songs that are in serious contention to make the record, I mean, like, forty to fifty? You got to whittle it down…

“Then you’re getting into, like, it’s like heavyweight fights because all the songs you really like all of them.”

After Rinella expressed surprise at the number of songs, Combs explained his outlook on making albums when artists release extraordinarily long LPs to benefit from digital streaming services.

Combs continued, “15 would be finished… that’s one record. Now people are putting out bigger and bigger records, that’s been the trend as the streaming economy has taken off… now instead of selling a physical CD, right, back in the day you were limited by how many songs could be on a CD.

“If you start putting out a double CD, back then, you’ve got to start charging people double, because now there’s two discs in there that you’ve purchased and packaging and special cases and all that stuff. So, you feel like that will impact sales because the consumer goes, ‘Well, I don’t want to pay twice as much for this album.’ So that limited people from putting too many songs on their record because they didn’t want to risk not selling as many…

“I think country is the first genre that has really started putting out these BIG hit records where there’s a bunch of songs on them… [Morgan Wallen’s] next record is 37 songs, I think… I think Zach Bryan did 36, you know, and it’s a brilliant strategy because your album sales are based off of stream equivalents.”

You can watch the interview below.

Earlier this year, Luke Combs broke records when he became the first-ever country music artist to headline stadiums in Australia. For the tour, he was joined by special guests Jordan Davis, Mitchell Tenpenny, and Australia’s own Lane Pittman.