Review & Setlist: Luke Combs radiates sincerity in rain-shortened Gillette set (2024)

Concert Reviews

The country star, currently topping the charts with 'Fast Car,' made the most of the hour he got before the weather cut things short.

By Marc Hirsh

July 22, 2023

Luke Combs, with The Avett Brothers, Gary Allan and David Lee Murphy, at Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Friday, July 21

An artist who made their bones in Nashville, riding the momentum of a monster pop hit, playing Gillette Stadium in the pouring rain amidst a sold-out multi-night run? It’s been done. But Luke Combs couldn’t help but follow in Taylor Swift’s footsteps on Friday night as the weather did what the weather is apt to do when there’s an open-air concert to be had.

The bad news was that due to an extended mid-show thunderstorm delay, Combs delivered a truncated set that totaled a mere 60 minutes over two sets. The good news was that none of that hour was wasted time, with Combs proving that his ascent to megastardom was no fluke.

That was also, in its way, the bad news, with Combs strong enough to rue the circ*mstances that cut his stage time short. (Combs plays a second, presumably uninterrupted show on Saturday.) After softening up the Boston-adjacent crowd with the one-two punch of the Dropkick Murphys’ “I’m Shipping Up To Boston” blasting through the sound system and then showing an aw-shucks humble-beginnings video montage that included plenty of childhood photos (and a school-musical video snippet) of the singer, Combs came out with a swaggering roll on “Lovin’ On You.”

Musically, anyway; the two-time CMA Entertainer Of The Year himself could hardly have been more unassuming. Throughout the night, he showed that he had essentially zero stage presence, to the point where thatbecamehis stage presence. Without any apparent thought into what to do with his body as he sang, Combs was simply a burly guy with a hell of a voice, casually ambling from spot to spot like the modest everyman he paints himself as in songs like “Doin’ This” and the high chug of “Where The Wild Things Are.” That lack of polish was his strength, creating the impression — genuine or not — that Combs was radiating sincerity.

It bled into his also-burly vocals as well. On “Lovin’ On You,” “Hannah Ford Road” and “Beer Never Broke My Heart,” Combs didn’t rev up the power of his voice so much as bear down on it, digging into the lyrics rather than showboating to rise above them. The same happened when he went in the opposite direction on numbers like “One Number Away,” where Combs only had to go a hair more delicate than his baseline to make the message clear. Likewise, “Must’ve Never Met You” never quite shaded into the weeper it might’ve been in another singer’s hands, but he produced all the feels even so.

The dirty snarl that the musicians behind him kicked up in the pointed but never nasty “Cold As You” pointed to another way that Combs set himself apart from his peers, which is that there didn’t seem to be an ill-tempered or bad-natured bone in his body. A different country star’s backing band might have sounded menacing on “Doin’ This,” but with Combs setting the tone, they came off as simply determined.

There’s only so far determination can take a performer when the elements are involved, though, and after a solo-electric performance of “This One’s For You” where he tilted his head back and luxuriated in the rain, Combs said “I’ll be back as soon as they’ll let me” and vanished for 45 minutes as the crowd was asked to seek shelter in the concourse. (Not many did.) It was still pouring when he returned, which didn’t stop a stadium full of people from singing along to the entirety of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” bouncing and pumping fists during the refrain where the narrator experiences her fleeting moments of freedom.

After “Love You Anyway,” which leaned on more traditional country trappings like fiddle, Combs announced that he had to call the show after two more songs. “It ain’t up to me,” he told the audience, “but I’ll give you the best two f—ing songs I got,” launching into “The Kind Of Love We Make” and “Beer Never Broke My Heart.” And with his guitar, banjo and bass players all getting soaked on the goalpost-shaped catwalk alongside him as he celebrated the only thing that never let him down, Combs still wasn’t mean or angry about the people and things that did. He simply dug in hard and unloaded.

With “Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not” setting the tone, opener David Lee Murphy’s set focused more on upbeat rocking than on heartstring-pulling, though the some-things-get-better-with-age theme of “Dust On The Bottle” resonated harder coming from a 64-year-old than from the 36-year-old who recorded it. Gary Allan followed with a whiskey-wracked voice and a bit more of a co*cky strut that reshuffled itself into a determined confidence when he amped up the sensitivity on “Watching Airplanes” and “Songs About Rain,” where his band joined in after two solo-acoustic verses, warmly rumbling and heavy as the sky began to darken.

As the final opening act, the Avett Brothers were the first to contend with the rain, beginning with “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” done as the type of Appalachian folk music that eventually morphed into country, before settling into wildly earnest baroque roots-pop. Grinning and bouncing and imploring the audience to sing along to cello lines, they brought indie-rock dynamics — like stop-start rhythms and varying tempos within songs — in a seeming breach of country-concert protocol.

Setlist for Luke Combs at Gillette Stadium, July 21, 2023:

• Lovin’ On You
• Hannah Ford Road
• Cold As You
• One Number Away
• Houston, We Got A Problem
• You Found Yours
• Going, Going, Gone
• Must’ve Never Met You
• Doin’ This
• This One’s For You

(RAIN DELAY)

• Where The Wild Things Are
• Fast Car (Tracy Chapman cover)
• Love You Anyway
• The Kind Of Love We Make
• Beer Never Broke My Heart

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [emailprotected] or on Twitter @spacecitymarc.