By Jonathan Bernstein
A decade or so into his career, Luke Combs is at the stage when commercial country stars have decide whether they’re going to act much younger in order to stay on the radio, radically reinvent themselves, or settle into the comforts of playing past hits to crowds that remain adoring even if they stop growing. The Way I Am makes the case that Combs, at this potentially tenuous stage of his career can reject all those options by simply expanding the idea of what Luke Combs, age 36, can and should be.
The Way I Am is a largely successful and occasionally exhausting attempt at integrating all of Combs’ many selves — the serious, the hard partying, the gruff, the vulnerable — into one. It makes the convincing case that as an artist, songwriter and down-the-center representative of a genre as sprawling (and red-hot popular) as country music, Luke Combs contains multitudes.
We’ve all been forced to acclimate to blockbuster albums with runtimes as long as Fellini flicks. The average length of the current Top Five albums in Billboard’s country chart (three of which are Morgan Wallen’s) is 28.6 songs, or three-and-a-half Born to Runs. But unlike those records, the length of Combs’ latest is the point. Can Combs sing about being a devoted dad on the same record that he tries to shotgun another twelve pack of Miller Lites? Should he? He’s given himself 22 songs to figure it out.
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This means Combs can still deliver dumb genius Music Row wordplay on one song (“Alcohol of Fame”) and tell character-driven stories about convicts serving life sentences (“15 Minutes”) or soldiers missing their loved ones in combat (“Ever Mine”) on another. He can channel Taylor Swift’s “Long Live” and write a beautifully sappy song about his connection to his audience (“Tell ‘Em About Tonight”), or switch course yet again and spend an entire song using Dale Earnhardt’s 1998 Daytona 500 win as a metaphor for a failed relationship. He can quote Lonesome Dove, namecheck Joe Diffie, and shout out his favorite fishing rod brand. He can make binge drinking seem like the most liberating thing in the world one song, then sing about the gut-wrenching consequences of alcoholism in the next. He can sing, like so many country music men insist on doing, about a man having complex feelings about his daughter getting married. He can begin his collection with the rousing declaration of a cowboy who’d gotten soft getting back in the saddle ready to let loose and then stamp a somber black and white photo of himself contemplating life’s mysteries on that very same album.
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But how does it sound? Combs takes a big-tent sonic approach to country music; much like the statement he’s making about his own identity at 36, the album tries to be everywhere at once. There’s revved up rock, R&B mid-tempo tunes, rootsy ballads, chest-thumping radio hits, blues dirges, and tasteful tunes that’d be at home on Adult/Contemporary radio. The Way I Am is in, fact, most notable for what it doesn’t sound like: It avoids any tempting trend-seeking, neither fully dipping into the Nineties Country nostalgia Zach Top has crystallized nor any of the smooth production sheen that Wallen and Ella Langley have ridden to the top of charts. Instead, there’s a mix of songs that feel like genuine new musical directions (see the bluegrass-tinged “Ever Mine” or listen to Combs’ phrasing during the verses of “Wish Upon a Whiskey”), as well as rowdy raves songs that feel like Combs could be on autopilot (see “My Kinda Saturday Night”).
The album ends with “A Man Was Born,” which nods, sonically, to his breakthrough cover of “Fast Car.” It’s a coming of age tale of a young man who learns more about himself every time he faces adversity. It’s also one of several songs on The Way I Am that feels, on some level, like self-conscious commentary on Combs’ wrestling with his own career and astronomical success as a man, father, and husband in his mid-thirties. “I’m a walking contradiction,” he sings earlier, on the title track, in a wink to Kristofferson’s “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33.” “But a well-intentioned man.”
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