Cody Johnson and Luke Combs are two major names in country music right now, and as it turns out, they’re also good friends. Johnson opened up about their friendship in a new episode of Bobby Bones Presents: The BobbyCast, sharing that he’s known Combs since the superstar was “playing tennis courts.”
“I have nothing but respect for Luke, and I’ve been opening for Luke Combs since he was playing tennis courts,” Johnson said. “He played a tennis court and it was like 6,000 people. It wasn’t a huge show, and of course he was blowing up at the time, but I think real respects real. And whenever I saw Luke for the first time, I went, ‘That’s real.’ The way he handles his camp, the way he handles his finances, the way he records his records, the content that he’s putting out, I had a lot of respect.”
Johnson was a special guest on Combs’ 2023 World Tour overseas, a request the Texas native said was an instant yes for him.
“He’s opened a lot of doors for me,” Johnson told host Bobby Bones. “Like I said, we went from opening for him from tennis courts and pavilions to stadiums, and I’m not a coattail rider, but whenever a good friend of that many years says, ‘Hey, do you want to go be direct support for me overseas?’ You say, ‘Hell yes I do.’”
The “The Fall” singer also shared his mentality on serving as support for a headliner’s tour, explaining that rather than tone it down to let the headliner shine, he wants to turn up the heat as much as possible, something Combs appreciated.
“He knows I’m coming out to try to mop the floor, and all it did was elevate their game,” Johnson said. “And he’s like, ‘Dude, I love having you open, because it just pushes us to a different level of knowing, Hey, if we’re going to follow that, we better gear it up.’ I’m like, ‘That’s a very high compliment from him.’”
Along with their time on tour together, the two have collaborated on stage on a few occasions including during Johnson’s tour stop in Nashville in February 2025, when Combs showed up for a duet of his hit “Beer Never Broke My Heart.”
Johnson and Combs will also appear on one another’s upcoming albums in different capacities — Johnson recently revealed that Combs recorded a duet with him for his as-yet-untitled new project, while Combs’ upcoming album The Way I Am features a track he wrote with Johnson and Jake Mears, “I Ain’t No Cowboy.”
Johnson hasn’t set a release date for his new album, but he told Bones the project is “almost finished” and will arrive at some point this year. “Don’t really have a date on it. I hate setting a date. I hate setting a date and working backwards,” he explained. “So we also have all this new material that we’re going to start trying to dig into so that whenever tracks hit and a new single hits after ‘The Fall’ hopefully goes number one, we can have all this new material sitting in the tank.”
