Luke Combs and Billy Strings Cross ‘The Great Divide’ in Bluegrass Collab
Check out this timely taste of a future Luke Combs bluegrass album.
Luke Combs and guitar phenom Billy Strings aim to bridge a culture gap in their bluegrass-inflected collab, “The Great Divide,” hoping to fix things before it’s too late.
Featuring a rootsy acoustic sound grounded in Kentucky bluegrass, Combs and the six-string savant teamed up to co-write the track with Wyatt Durrette in June of 2020. At the time, the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams, and in the country music tradition of writing “three chords and the truth,” “The Great Divide” calls it like Combs and company see it.
All about neighbors building walls and convictions that do more harm than good, the track has a bit of an ominous flavor, like a shadow creeping its way across a room. There’s already a canyon between us, Combs sings, while Strings lets his fingers fly up and down the guitar neck. We’re so far apart we can’t see eye to eye, and we’re getting closer to the edge of that canyon every day. We need to turn arounds soon, or risk going over the edge.
“We’re all so far, so far apart now / It’s as deep as it is wide / We’re about to fall apart now / If we can’t reach the other side / We gotta find a way across the great divide,” goes the desperate, dark-country chorus.
Speaking in an official statement, Combs says “The Great Divide” is part of an idea he has to eventually record an entire bluegrass album, and may be the first step toward that ultimate goal.
“Something that I’ve always wanted to do is write and put out a bluegrass album,” he explains. “This is a song that was supposed to be a part of that project. It’s not a lead single or a lead-in to that project yet, because that is not done. But it felt like the right time to put this song out. When we wrote it, there were a lot of crazy things going on in the world. There’s still a lot of crazy things going on in the world. And I just felt like I had some stuff to say. It’s not meant to be political. It’s not meant to try and tell you what to think or tell you how to believe. That’s not my job. It’s just a guy kinda saying the way he was feeling when he wrote it.”
Luke Combs recently marked another Number One with his latest single, “Better Together,” extending a streak that has seen each single of his career top the charts. Billy Strings is newly arrived on the country scene, but quickly making himself known. Acclaimed for his guitar prowess, he’s up for Best Bluegrass Album at the 63rd Grammy Awards (March 14) for his breakout set, Home.
