Luke Bryan

One of country music’s brightest 21st-century stars, Luke Bryan rose from humble beginnings to become a stadium headliner whose affable charm and resolute optimism fuelled a series of carefree country-rock jams. Born in Leesburg, Georgia, in 1976, Bryan began playing guitar as a teen, and while in college at Georgia Southern University he gigged on and around campus. Shortly after he graduated, he moved to Nashville, where he broke in as a songwriter before scoring his own record deal. His 2007 debut single “All My Friends Say,” a hip-shaking recollection of a rough night out, blended honky-tonk attitude with heartbroken candour. Bryan would become known for being one of Nashville’s more genre-busting performers, covering Lady Gaga and OneRepublic songs while releasing singles like the hip-hop-tinged “Country Girl (Shake It for Me)” and the shimmering ballad “Do I.” His time spent on the college circuit inspired his series of Spring Break EPs, a party-minded run of releases that, along with tracks like the stomping “Kick the Dust Up” and the chilled-out Florida Georgia Line collaboration “This Is How We Roll,” positioned him as the king of the brawny subgenre called “bro country.” Yet Bryan has held on to the sense of humanity and hope that informed his earliest songwriting, with the elegiac “Drink a Beer” and the sanguine “Most People Are Good” showing off his vulnerable side, and his annual Farm Tour benefit concerts bringing his celebratory live sets to the rural areas that shaped him.