The perfect second at this 12 months’s Grammy Awards got here when nation music star Luke Combs carried out his model of “Quick Automobile” with the music’s author, Tracy Chapman. The bearlike 34-year-old Carolinian appeared greatly surprised singing alongside together with his childhood heroine, and the famously shy Chapman lastly appeared in a position to benefit from the crowd’s admiration as Taylor Swift stood as much as dance.
Crammed out with fiddle and mandolin, Combs’s devoted cowl took the 1988 hit to No 2 on the Billboard chart final 12 months. It was then named music of the 12 months by the Nation Music Affiliation in November, with Chapman changing into the primary Black girl ever to obtain the prize. Together with the March launch of Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter (the primary album by a Black girl to high the nation albums chart), the Combs-Chapman duet felt like a serious second within the turning of a cultural tide that had, over the previous 15 years, seen nation music dominated by a white, macho tradition nicknamed “Bro Nation”.
It’s into this seachange that Combs drops his fifth album, Fathers & Sons. Each bit as easygoing and comfortingly crafted as followers would hope, it’s a set of honest songs by which the singer pays tribute to his father and grandfather, and sends up hopes that he can supply comparable assist to his personal two younger boys, Tex and Beau. Lyrically, he conjures photos of “an previous man on a La-Z-Boy/ Western on TV” (“Bear in mind Him That Approach”), reminiscences of baseball (“Take Me Out to the Ballgame”), and children working round with BB weapons (“Little Nation Boys”).
In an period once we’ve all been unpicking poisonous masculinity, it’s slightly beautiful to listen to the simple movement of affection between the generations of boys and males. Within the custom of Harry Chapin’s 1974 folk-country basic “Cat’s within the Cradle”, Combs retains the emphasis on the passage of time and the shifting energy dynamics with the passing years. However in contrast to Chapin, he sees the admiration wax, not wane. So on “Entrance Door Well-known”, he’s proud to inform listeners that, regardless of his large success, the perfect reward he can want for is a hug from his “Daddy”. Combs does all of it with out scaring the horses of conventional Southern bloke tradition: he hymns the sharing of sizzling canine, not lattes, in spite of everything.
Stylistically, Combs works squarely throughout the basic nation custom, with no evident ambition to reinvent the wheel. Every of the 12 strong, mid-tempo songs rolls out with a reassuringly comparable, predictable form. Selecting altering gear into strumming, and again. Pedal metal glinting. Breezes of mandolin blowing by means of your hair. Fiddles swooping down like birds from telegraph wires because the singer leans into his tender narratives, the melodies taking the emotional load and transferring it on to permit the listener to take a seat again and sway alongside. No surprise Rishi Sunak says he’s a fan – for a primary minister on the point of dropping a basic election, that is music designed to ask no laborious questions. It’s simply there that will help you take a load off.
Sure, it’s sentimental. Combs’s critics examine the singer to Ed Sheeran. The pair – who collaborated on “Life Goes On” – share an identical shambling, low-key tendency to depend on method and everyman references. Combs offers the looks of making an attempt much less laborious, and fewer cynically, to bash out the bangers, although. And in these turbulent occasions, there’s solace within the fraternal embrace of such reassuring decency.
