What You See Is What You Get by Luke Combs
What You See Is What You Get is the second studio album by American country music singer Luke Combs, released through River House Artists and Columbia Nashville on November 8, 2019. It includes all five songs previously featured on the 2019 EP The Prequel including the singles "Beer Never Broke My Heart" and "Even Though I'm Leaving", in addition to the track "1, 2 Many", a collaboration with Brooks & Dunn. Combs will tour North America throughout the remainder of 2019 and will headline the C2C: Country to Country festival in Europe in 2020 in promotion of the album. Background Combs said his intention with new track "1, 2 Many" was to "write a song that I felt like my '90s country music heroes would be proud of". It marks his second collaboration with Brooks & Dunn, with his first being a cover of their debut single "Brand New Man" on their album Reboot.
Luke Combs could’ve relied on a formula popular with so many of his country peers during the 2010s: swaggeringly flirtatious, beat-driven jams. Instead, he circled back to the evergreen country approach of placing a persuasive persona at the heart of his music, and quickly fired up a fanbase with his way of inhabiting the good-humoured blue-collar regular guy role. It helped that his songwriting was sturdy and clever and his performances hearty. On the follow-up to Combs’ blockbuster 2017 debut, that vantage point is even more robust, and also more knowing. “Beer Never Broke My Heart”, a propulsive honky-tonk number that initially appeared on an EP, is a mischievous take on avoiding emotional investment in anything with the potential to disappoint, and “1, 2 Many” is a vigorous barroom boogie featuring Brooks & Dunn—experts at that style—and full of playfully cocky bragging about boozy bad behaviour. “I think country music fans like songs that they can drink and have a good time to,” Combs tells Apple Music. “The fast-pumping rhythms and big Telecaster guitars take you back to what country music was like in the ’90s. Country fans are starved for an uptempo song, and that’s what this is.”<br /> Combs is equally charismatic delivering more sensitive songs, like the romantic ballad “Nothing Like You” and “Does to Me”, a collaboration with Eric Church that takes pride in down-to-earth sincerity. In "New Every Day" and "Every Little Bit Helps", Combs brings satisfyingly agile exertion to hooks that would humble a lesser singer. He continued his partnership with producer Scott Moffatt and core co-writer Ray Fulcher on this 17-song set, re-energising both muscular and supple sounds learned from a couple of generations of hard country predecessors.
