For Luke Grimes, music has always been deeply personal, but with his sophomore album, Red Bird, out today (Friday, April 3), that’s more evident than ever. The collection, produced by Dave Cobb, finds the singer/songwriter, best known for his role as Kayce Dutton in Yellowstone and Marshals, pulling back the curtain on grief, faith, and healing, while revealing how the loss of his father shaped not only one of the album’s most emotional songs, but the project’s very identity.
Featuring 10 solid tracks, Red Bird delivers organic instrumentation and unfiltered storytelling. Grimes recorded the project, taking trips between Savannah and Nashville’s RCA Studio A. During those sessions building the album, he found himself leaning into warm, stripped-down arrangements, letting acoustic guitar, piano, and pedal steel carry the sonic aspect of the album, anchored by heartfelt storytelling.
Serving as the bookend, and packing an emotional punch is the touching, “A Little More Time,” a quiet, piano-driven ballad inspired by the passing of Grimes’ father, Pastor J. Randy Grimes, who died in 2022. As with the track, his presence looms large across the record. “A Little More Time” closes Red Bird on a deeply reflective note, capturing the kind of loss that lingers long after the moment itself.
“The most emotional was for sure ‘A Little More Time.’ That was one of two songs I already had written …I wrote that song with Natalie Hemby, it was just us two. I knew it was going on the album, and that was sort of the first time I felt like there might be a direction for the album,” Grimes recently told Music Mayhem. “Honestly, I didn’t know if I would end up being able to write that song because I tried a lot on the first album and was never able to accomplish it…”
“Something started sparking in the room with Natalie, where we actually were like a couple of hours into writing the same title… it was a romantic song to a girl, and just something was like, there’s something about the vibe of that day and with her,” he added. “ And I thought this might be a time to try that. And I had the idea that maybe this ‘A Little More Time’ idea could be about my father. So she switched from the guitar to the piano, and we switched the vibe up and went in that direction, and that song came together pretty quickly after that.”
That sense of loss extends beyond a single track. In fact, it’s woven into the DNA of Red Bird, including its title. For Grimes, the phrase carries both symbolic and personal meaning, shaped in part by a lyric from a song that didn’t make the album.
“The album was sort of done, and we hadn’t titled it yet, and I kind of went through a lot of different options…nothing was really sticking or feeling like it represented the album too well. And actually one of the songs that didn’t kind of make the album that we had cut and decided to scrap had a lyric in it that said, ‘Whenever I see a Red Bird, I think of you.’ And in a lot of Southern states, if you see a Cardinal, it means that someone from your past is sort of coming to visit you. It’s like an Omen. Obviously, there’s a lot of loss on this album, and so that kind of Red Bird line sort of stuck with me. Then also being from Ohio, the Cardinal is the State Bird of Ohio. And I just felt like it’s sort of like an all-encompassing title that spoke to not only who I am, but what the album’s about.”
While grief is a guiding force, Red Bird also explores how love and faith intersect with loss. Because he was raised by a Pastor, Grimes says his spiritual foundation naturally found its way into the music, especially when writing about his father.
“I mean, my dad was a pastor. Obviously, my dad’s all over the album. There’s no way for me to tell the truth about myself without having some sort of faith or religion, just because that’s how I grew up. And that’s changed over the years. I kind of developed my own path with some of that stuff. But yeah, to not include the idea of some sort of prayer in a song about my father would really be leaving a big chunk of him out of it.”
While there’s plenty of emotional depth in the material, Grimes and Cobb often relied on spontaneity when writing songs in the studio alongside songwriter Jessie Jo Dillon.
“Dave sort of found that as we were going, we wanted to try something different than we had on the first album,” Grimes shared. “So a lot of the songs that I came in with, we sort of kind of left on the table, and we were like, ‘Why don’t we just write in the studio?’ A little more old school. Let’s try to capture something and not have a demo that you’ve had for months that you’re sick of. Let’s try to get something fresh and try to capture lightning in a bottle.”
“He loves Jessie Jo [Dillon],” he continued. “So did I. So she came by, and that first night that she came after we were done recording for the day, she came over to RCA, and we wrote three songs in like two hours. It was really fast, and it felt like something really special was happening. And I think, in that moment, we all realized this is how this should go.”
That in-the-moment approach allowed Grimes to fully embrace being vulnerable, not just in grief, but in confronting his own imperfections. Songs throughout the album touch on regret, growth, and ways of coping with hardship.
“It’s pretty autobiographical,” Grimes confirms of the album. “….trying to show all aspects of the person that I was while we were making that album. It was just sort of like, let’s get directly to the source and just talk about who I am right now and my life right now. And there’s a lot of love on the album. Fatherhood is on the album. Losing my father is on the album. But there are also the good ways and the not-so-good ways that I’ve dealt with those things. And I think we all can, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we can all admit that sometimes when we go through loss or hard things, we don’t deal with it properly.”
Now a father himself, Grimes says the experience of loss has reshaped how he views both his life and legacy, something that quietly informs every track on Red Bird.
“I’ve always just said, I think a good way to go is I want to leave this place better than I found it. I want to make sure that when I leave this world, that I’ve not only picked up after myself, but I’ve left some beautiful things behind, and that my son can think that I took a really big swing at life, and I took chances and I was brave, and that he can do the same thing.”
After years of embodying Kayce Dutton, Grimes may be best known as a cowboy on screen, but with Red Bird, he’s telling a much more personal story. One shaped by loss, grounded in love, and ultimately, defined by the time we wish we had just a little more of. This vulnerable project will definitely take Grimes musical career to the next level as the songs are destined to resonate with the masses.
Luke Grimes Red Bird Track List
- High Rise Jeans (Luke Grimes, Dave Cobb, Jessie Jo Dillon)
- Come Home (Luke Grimes, Dave Cobb, Jessie Jo Dillon)
- Love You Now (Luke Grimes, Dave Cobb, Jessie Jo Dillon)
- Hummingbird (Luke Grimes, Dave Cobb, Jessie Jo Dillon)
- Drink Drink Drink (Luke Grimes, Dave Cobb, Jessie Jo Dillon)
- Love Me That Way (Luke Grimes, Nick Walsh, Wolf Mahler)
- I’m Not Gonna Leave You (Luke Grimes, Dave Cobb, Jessie Jo Dillon)
- Without You (Luke Grimes, Dave Cobb, Jessie Jo Dillon)
- Haunted (Luke Grimes, Dave Cobb, Jessie Jo Dillon)
- A Little More Time (Luke Grimes, Natalie Hemby)
