Luke Bryan has remained true to himself. From his days as a struggling musician, he has consistently created music that reflects his love of rural life. When he isn’t on tour, he can be found hunting, fishing and driving around back roads in a pickup truck. In short, his offstage activities are often the very things he sings about onstage.
Even the titles of Bryan’s two Capitol Records Nashville albums convey how important it is for the singer to present himself honestly: I’ll Stay Me, which was released in August 2007, and Doin’ My Thing, which arrived in October.
Bryan won legions of fans with I’ll Stay Me, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Country Albums chart in its first week of release and yielded two Top 10 hits, “All My Friends Say” and “Country Man,” as well as the charting single “We Rode in Trucks.”
Complementing his success as an artist, Bryan has also earned respect for his talents as a writer. Billy Currington’s No. 1 single “Good Directions,” composed by Bryan and Rachel Thibodeau, was named the 2008 ASCAP Country Song of the Year. That same year, him.”
The album’s lead single, “Do I,” is a ballad composed by Bryan and a couple of his Capitol label mates, Dave Haywood and Charles Kelley of the CMA Awards-winning trio Lady Antebellum. Hillary Scott, also of Lady Antebellum, contributed harmony vocals on the recorded track.
“Charles, Dave and I had been threatening to write for a couple of months,” Bryan said, with a chuckle. “With them being from Georgia and myself being from Georgia, we just wanted to see where that would take us. So I called them up one day and they came over to my house. We sat on the front porch, drank a couple of beers and threw some ideas around. The idea of ‘Do I’ came up and we knocked it out right there on the front porch. We knew we had something cool and pretty special right when we wrote it. Hillary just loved the song, so we got her to sing background vocals. It’s been fun to experience that song with all of Lady A.”
“Do I” showcases Bryan’s skills as a balladeer — skills that may not be apparent to the casual fan who knows the singer only from his humorous music videos. “We wanted to show that side of me right off the bat,” Bryan explained. “I had been flirting with getting a ‘party boy’ image. We wanted to show that I was able to sing a little more than people may have realized. You don’t ever want to be labeled a one-trick pony. Capitol’s motto is ‘You lead with your best stuff,’ and everybody at the label was very excited about ‘Do I.’”
Perhaps the most unusual track on the album is a moody version of “Apologize,” an international hit for the rock band OneRepublic in 2007 written by the group’s lead singer Ryan Tedder. “We started playing that song about a year and a half ago,” Bryan said. “Fans really responded to it. We had so many fans commenting on it on MySpace, just begging for me to record it. Blake Shelton heard me do it one night at Oakland’s Oracle Arena, and he met me at the side of the stage and told me that if I didn’t record it he was going to whup my butt. So Blake pushed me over the edge on it.”
Stevens concurs. “All you have to do is listen to Luke’s music a little bit,” the producer said, “and you can tell that this is a guy who is telling you the truth.”
On the Web: www.LukeBryan.com
© 2010 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.
