Luke Combs Says It Was "Really Hard" To Miss His Son's Birth

Being a wildly successful country star playing music around the world certainly has its perks, but constant touring has one big downside: missing major life events. That’s what happened to Luke Combs and he’s still reeling from it. 

The North Carolina native stopped by Zane Lowe’s podcast on Apple Music to discuss his latest album, Fathers & Sons. As the title suggests, the album has Combs reflecting on fatherhood and being a parent to his two kids, Tex and Beau. During their conversation about the album, Combs revealed a painful moment that came on one of the happiest days of his life. 

Combs was on tour in Australia when his wife, Nicole, went into labor with Beau two-and-a-half weeks early. "I probably woke up at around 8:00 AM or something like that, Australia time, and I had a text from my wife. And it said, 'I'm so sorry, I really tried to not have the baby while you're gone’," Combs, audibly and visibly choked up with emotion, recounted on the podcast.

Combs was on the other side of the world and couldn't fly the 18 hours to be home and was not able to be there for his wife or to meet his newborn child. “I was supposed to be home and I wasn't,” Combs said on the show. The memory seems to haunt him a bit. “I haven't really told anybody that," Combs told Lowe on the podcast. "I didn't cover that too much in this album because it's really hard for me to deal with."

He went on to say that while it was a "hard day, But God I was lucky. A lot of my closest friends now work for me so I had a really great support system."

Fathers & Sons is out now.