Luke Bryan’s Mind Of A Country Boy album has arrived, marking his eighth studio album since the beginning of his decades-long career. Produced by Jeff and Jody Stevens, the collection provides listeners with 14 tracks, including early previews of “Country On,” “But I Got a Beer in My Hand,” “Love You, Miss You, Mean It,” “Country Song Came On,” and “Closing Time in California.”
From Party Anthems To Family Man: Luke Bryan Finds Comfort With Family-Oriented Album
As a whole, Mind Of A Country Boy reflects where the five-time Entertainer of the Year is in his life right now as he takes a family-oriented approach with songs about his wife and sons, the joys of simple small-town living, and more.
Speaking to Music Mayhem and other media during an early September press conference at Green Door Gourmet in Nashville, Tenn., Bryan shared details of his album. He noted that while his music is often associated with party crowds, this time, he leaned into the mature side of his storytelling — something he calls a natural progression of his artistry.
“I’ve always kind of leaned toward youthful fun, just fun party music, I mean, hadn’t been just that, but I think I’ve kind of been put in that category, which I love, and I’ve enjoyed and when people come to my show, I think they come to have a great time,” Bryan said. “But this album, when you look at ‘Jesus For My Kids,’ there’s more mature-type subject matter….”
“These Songs Are What Gets Me Right Now”
Despite the depth of the material, Bryan says his thought process for creating his album was more relaxed, even when it came down to penning and selecting the songs that made the project. He adds that he and his team tracked about 19 songs before they axed the ones that didn’t make the cut.
“I’m not out there grinding, writing 200 songs a year like I did for ten years…,” Bryan shared. “It is just me cutting the stuff that gets me, and these songs are what gets me right now. It reflects a lot where I’m at.”
“That doesn’t mean when the right big old party number comes along, I’m not going to still say ‘yes’ to them…” he adds. “I think it’s just a total reflection of… I mean, a great evening for me is sitting on the porch. Every four days, me, Bo, Til, and Tate, we cited in our bow and arrows sitting on the porch, and Caroline was, we were sitting there rocking on the porch. Those are the best kinds of evenings…If I were running to Ibiza and partying in nightclubs to techno music or whatever the kids call it these days, it wouldn’t be where I’m at. That’s not what I do. I mean, what I do is I get off the road, and I try to hang out with friends and family outdoors, and I’m always going to try to write about that.”
“For The Kids” Paints A Real-Life Picture
Bryan offers plenty of tunes about the outdoors on Mind Of A Country Boy, from “Fish On The Wall” to “I’m On A Tractor.” But in “For The Kids,” he paints a real-life picture of what it’s like to raise a family and not have time to commit to keeping the romance alive between husband and wife. Bryan initially started writing “For The Kids” solo. Still, he says the song, which he ended up co-writing alongside Justin Ebach and Brad Tursi, isn’t necessarily about his marriage but rather what he’s seen other families go through. And he acknowledges that it can be tough to keep the passion between spouses alive when it comes to raising children.
“’For The Kids’ is a song that I wrote. It was a song I had thought about and when I presented it to my co-writers, I looked at ’em. I’m like, ‘guys, I don’t want to tell you all this idea, but I feel like it’s something that we got to write,’” Bryan explained. “And I said, ‘I got a song called ‘For the Kids.’ We do all these things for the kids, and we pour all of our energy into these kids, and the next thing you know, you’re kind of married for the kids, and then being married for the kids keeps you married too.’”
Bryan went on to say that his conversations with married couples in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, were never “‘Oh my God, it was amazing from the start until now.’ They always reference the ebbs and the flows and the challenges of families and all that. So this song I think touches on that as real as anybody or any song I’ve ever heard…. If that makes a bunch of people wake up and go, ‘You know what? We need to take a vacation and leave the kids with the in-laws and get back to us a little bit.’ If I can get some people thinking about that too, that’s the beauty of country music.”
Luke Bryan’s Wife Caroline Favorite Songs On The Album
A family man through and through, Bryan, who is a father of two sons Thomas “Bo” Boyer and Tatum “Tate” Christopher, and happily married to his wife Caroline, makes room for romance on Mind Of A Country Boy. Caroline’s favorite tracks happen to fall into that category as Bryan shares that she is partial to “Kansas,” “She’s Still Got It” and top 5 single “Love You Miss You Mean It,” which helped provide the framework for the album.
Caroline is featured in the audio video for “She’s Still Got It,” which was written by Will Bundy, Rodney Clawson, Jim McCormick, and Heather Morgan. In the clip, she and Bryan can be seen hugging, kissing, and holding hands in a stunning meadow. The video proves just how strong the couple’s relationship is since tying the knot in 2006.
“It’s funny when I wrote, ‘Do I,’ Caroline and I just got married and everybody called us going, ‘Are y’all okay?’ I’m like, ‘It’s a song,’” Bryan laughs about how some of his songs don’t mirror his true relationship with Caroline. “So I’m sure everybody will be checking on us when they hear ‘For The Kids,’ but everything’s okay in that world.”
Highlights Fatherhood With Several Tracks On The Project
Elsewhere on Mind Of A Country Boy, Bryan highlights fatherhood in songs like “Pair of Boots” and “Fish On A Wall.” Both tracks find him coming full circle as he reflects on his younger years before being all grown up and watching his sons enjoy the experiences that he once had.
“Now I’m watching my boys backlash a line/ The muscadinе don’t fall far from the vine/ Spinner bait hung in a cypress tree/ Man, I swear they’re just like me,” Bryan sings in the “Fish On A Wall” chorus, noting how his boys are just like him.
In “Pair of Boots” Bryan gets even more sentimental, tapping into the relationship between father and son. In the bridge of the ballad, he discovers what it’s like to be a dad buying boots for his baby boy for the first time.
He sings, “First thing I did when I found out he was on the way/ Is drove my truck to the country store, picked out them baby snakes/ Eighty-something dollars on the counter, a couple of tears in my eyes/ Yeah, I knew right then how Daddy felt when he bought mine.”
“Every day I pulled my dad’s boots off when he got home,” Bryan remembers. “And we weren’t like a cowboy boot family, we were more like a hunting boot family. But anytime you got boots for Christmas, it was just boots and a BB gun, and you’d put ’em on and go run around in the woods with your new boots and your new BB gun.”
“I love the way that chorus, “he’ll wear ’em till he wears ’em out,’ and it’s just a well-done song,” he continues. “Then that second verse is one of my favorite things ever. It’s just a great song that I was able to get sent to me. It just speaks to rural working culture. You know, the heart of what country music fans are. I think that’s a proud moment…when my sons come to me, and they go, ‘Dad, take me fishing.’ Well, the reason why they’re doing that is because I carried ’em along in this thing. And so when you have a kid go, ‘Here’s your first pair of boots,’ and ‘Dad pick me out a pair of these hiking boots for our elk hunt.’ It’s cute, it’s awesome, little connections from father to son. And then when you look at ‘Jesus ‘Bout My Kids,’ I think we all when you become a parent, the anxieties of getting them through this life never go away, and I mean, you just lay in the bed every night and just pray that they get home safe. They get through life safe.”
The Most Poignant Track On The Album: “Jesus ‘Bout My Kids”
“Jesus ‘Bout My Kids” is perhaps the most poignant track out of the pack, which makes it an appropriate choice for an album closer, given that the 14 tracks are all about life, family, and simplicity. In the song, the 48-year-old Georgian sings of teaching spiritually to his children and asking for guidance from the man upstairs as he does his best to protect his family.
“I used to talk to my kids about Jesus/ Pray they’d find Him sooner than I did/ I used to talk to my kids about Jesus/ Now I talk to Jesus ’bout my kids,” the chorus goes.
“I think my spirituality and all that just comes from being in Leesburg, Georgia, and going to the Baptist church and singing in the choir and hearing the gospel and hearing all about farming,” Bryan says. “When you grow up in a farming family, you’re praying for so many things… I think the template of living or the example that Jesus put out there for the world, we would all just do our best to follow it, it’d be a pretty beautiful place around here.”
Bryan continues, “But the main thing is when handing it down to our children, I think the most important thing that kids do is just watch your every move. They watch your good days and your bad days… I’m pretty sure they picked up some of my language already, which I’m not proud about, but I know that they understand what they say in their prayers at night and [feel] blessed for what we have. They understand when dad does a make-a-wish kid, that that kid is in a more serious scenario than them. So throughout my life, my kids have been way more educated about the scope of the world. So we just try to keep it real, bring it back, with sitting around the table and all saying a prayer and talking about their day. And I think they know we’re praying for them all the time.”
“Country Song Came On”
Luke Bryan’s Mind Of A Country Boy also includes the previously released outside cut called “Country Song Came On.” Written by Dan Alley, Ryan Beaver, and Neil Medley, the tune tells the blue-collar story of a man clocking out of a hard day’s work and being drawn to the sights, sounds, and drinks of a local watering hole. But for Bryan, the song means much more than that. Although he didn’t write it, he says he was able to sit into his vocal and deliver the most authentic version of himself. In addition, he says the song lyrics took him back to when he was younger and performing in smaller joints.
“Through all my career… I think I’ve gotten a little bit unfairly labeled as NOT a guy that sang for many years in honky tonks [and] I mean, I would challenge anybody in my peer group… grew up singing in places where they wouldn’t let us in unless we had an adult with us, and it was rough. People had a beer and a paper sack,” he recalls. “So to go through my whole career and then to hear a song like that that’s so authentically something that sounds like just a honky tonk, dim-lit, neon light, beer drinking song. I mean, it knocked me… it hit me in all the right tingles and feel goods.”
“Then when I got in the studio and started singing it, I loved the way I was able to kind of do the vocals on it,” he continued. “….This song allowed me to be me in my own style. But it wasn’t like I tried to sound like ‘80s or ‘90s country. It’s just me doing a well-written honky tonk country song that’s authentic to me.”
Challenged Himself Vocally Throughout Mind Of A Country Boy
Having had a lengthy career, Bryan has settled into his voice. So much so that he says, “There’s really no surprises to me vocally…I used to have a lot of my challenges in my early albums cause I was still learning what my voice was growing to be and capable of.”
But he is being modest as he delivers an impressive falsetto, showing off his stellar vocal range in “Closing Time In California.” However, with the rise of social media and artists being discovered on platforms like TikTok, he shares, “My biggest challenge is trying to put music out that catches people’s ear just enough to where they still want to listen to what I’m doing and make sure I still can kind of be as relevant as I can be in an ever-changing climate of a lot of stuff going on in music.”
Before the release of Mind Of A Country Boy, it had been four years since the country music superstar dropped a full-length album. The last project he delivered was 2020’s Born Here Live Here Die Here, which spawned six singles, including “Knockin’ Boots,” “What She Wants Tonight,” “One Margarita,” “Down to One,” “Waves,” and “Up,” with the latter of the two appearing on the deluxe edition of the album.
Despite staying out of the studio, he kept busy working as a judge on American Idol, which is set to return in 2024. Bryan has also been on tour. Earlier this year, he wrapped both his Las Vegas Residency and just recently completed his 15th annual Farm tour, which brought him to various farms across the country and featured special guests — Conner Smith, Tucker Wetmore, the Peach Pickers (songwriters Dallas Davidson, Ben Hayslip and Rhett Akins with guest Rodney Clawson), and DJ Rock.