Luke Combs opened up about the difficult experience of missing the birth of his second son, Beau.
“I’ll never forget the craziest day, probably, in my life — close to it,” Combs, 34, shared during the Thursday, June 20, episode of The Zane Lowe Show. “One of the best and one of the worst days in my life at the same time.”
Combs said that he woke up on August 16, 2023, in Sydney, Australia, to a message from his wife, Nicole, who told him that she had gone into labor early. “I probably woke up at around 8:00 a.m. 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,’” he said, holding back tears. “And God, dude, it sucked.”
He continued, “He wasn’t born yet, but my wife went, she texted me on the way to the hospital and he was two and a half weeks early and I was supposed to be home and I wasn’t. And that was real hard to do.”
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The country star — who clarified that Beau, now 10 months, was actually born on August 15 in the United States — was across the world for his Luke Combs World Tour at the time. His final show was scheduled to be in Perth on August 26, allowing him to be home for his wife’s due date. Combs then planned to take a month off to spend time with his family before kicking off the next leg of the tour in Norway in September.
Although a quick red eye home wasn’t an option, Combs said that he was able to use technology in order to see Beau officially arrive. “I got to see him be born, which was awesome,” he gushed, noting that he was also “so lucky” to be surrounded by a strong “support system” of his closest friends. (He and Nicole, 31, also share 2-year-old son Tex.)
Combs is currently promoting his new album, Fathers and Sons, which hit shelves on Friday, June 14. Although the record delves into his experience as a dad, the singer said that he didn’t write about missing Beau’s birth because it’s still a “really hard” thing for him to “deal with.”
Other songs, however, touch on his life with Nicole and their little ones. In March, Combs uploaded a clip of a track to Instagram called “The Man He Sees in Me,” which references both Tex and Beau and the fear of not living up to their expectations.
When he asked his fans, “Is this heading in the right direction y’all?” Nicole replied in the comments section, writing, “You can’t just drop this and not tell me. Blindsided and EMOTIONAL.”
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Luke and Nicole were friends for years before they began dating in 2016. They tied the knot four years later and announced they were expecting their first child in Jane 2022. Tex arrived that June, just in time for Father’s Day, with Beau joining the brood the following year.
“I just had to do this project because being a dad to my boys has been the main thing on my mind lately,” Combs told American Songwriter earlier this month of creating Fathers and Sons. “I know it’s probably not what everyone expected my next album to be and I get that; I feel the same way in this not truly feeling like my next album. But being a dad is where life has taken me, and this album is a reflection of that in song form.”
