Tiffany Brittin Photography
Luke Combs knows how to tell a love story. In fact, he does it for a living.
The country star has written many of his biggest hits about his own happily-ever-after with wife Nicole—”Forever After All,” “Better Together” and the quadruple platinum “Beautiful Crazy” included. When Combs is asked to list his favorite things about Nicole during a joint phone call with his wife shortly after Christmas, he’s quick to bring up that particular song’s success.
“Well, I’ve written a few kind words about this woman before,” he jokes. “Don’t want to get into any of those being [CMA] Song of the Year or anything...”
“This is why we didn’t write our own wedding vows,” Nicole claps back, laughing.
The couple laughs easily—and often—through the interview, and after only a few minutes of conversation it’s easy to see that the newlyweds don’t just love each other. They genuinely like one another. Luke and Nicole (then Hocking) met long before Combs was a household name. (“He was a starving artist,” she notes.)
The two first crossed paths at a songwriters festival in Nicole’s home state of Florida when she was working for BMI in 2016. Back in Nashville, they started spending time together and their connection deepened.
David Bergman
“I could tell she was different than anybody I had ever met,” says Luke.
“I realized we could hang out and just be ourselves in front of each other,” Nicole says. “I could wear no makeup and be my weird self—because we’re all weird, but we get to choose who to share that side of us with. We could be each other’s weird in front of each other. That’s when it was like, ‘You know what? This guy’s a keeper.’”
In the meantime, Combs was growing from starving artist to best new artist—he won that title at both the CMA Awards and the ACM Awards, and earned a rare nomination for a country artist in that category at the Grammys. Through it all, Nicole was by his side, while growing her own public persona and a large social media following. In 2018, Luke released “Beautiful Crazy,” the aforementioned CMA Song of the Year written about Nicole.
“My buddy Wyatt Durrette had sent me this little poem thing and said, ‘Is this something?’ and it was ‘Crazy Beautiful’ or something,” Luke recalls. “The next time we wrote together I had just started hanging out with Nicole and had this overflow of feelings about her, so when I started writing, the lines just came out of the things that we did.
Like the ‘Her day starts with a coffee and ends with a wine’ part, that wasn’t a corny thing I made up. I just made her coffee every morning when we woke up and then I would pour her a wine every night. It just kind of fell together pretty quickly. I always felt like it was a really great song, and it was neat to be able to play it for her.”
Nicole recalls hearing the tune for the first time and noticing some surprising similarities.
“He came over one night and was like, ‘I wrote this song today. Do you want to hear it?’ I always want to hear his new stuff, so I said of course,” she says. “I was sitting there with a glass of wine and I was like, ‘Umm, this sounds really familiar.’ I don’t think he told me it was about me that night. I obviously didn’t want to ask, ‘Is this about me?’ It made me a little bit shy, but it was awesome. Everyone wants to have a song written about them!”
Combs continued to woo his future wife, and when it came time to propose he made an even grander gesture. Or at least, he tried to. The couple was moving into their first house together, transitioning from an apartment with two cats in tow. The new house was an hour away and the felines did not enjoy the ride.
“The cats were just not OK,” says Nicole, “they were panting, losing their bowels, stressing me out, so I was panicking because I’d never seen my cats like that before, and he was stressed out that I was stressed out, which I didn’t understand at the time, but he had this whole plan...”
“The cats were part of the plan,” adds Luke.
“We finally get to the house and I have to give the cats a bath, and it’s getting later and later, and I had to drive to work the next day which is an hour away now that we’ve moved,” she says. “My parents were flying in and I was picking them up after work. It turned out Luke had this whole plan set and he had called my dad that morning.”
“There was no ‘You can’t do it tonight’ because the next time she sees her parents, they’re going to come out of the airport and be like, ‘Oh, congratulations!’” says Luke.
In short, the songwriter was panicking. Luke had a plan: He had purchased new collars for the cats with their new address on them. In a perfect world the house wouldn’t be cluttered with moving boxes, piles of clothing, or soiled cats. But it was.
“I’m reliving it right now and I’m stressed,” laughs Nicole.
With the deadline of Nicole’s parental visit looming, he had to adapt.
“I was like, ‘Hey, I got these collars for the cats. And there was going to be something else on the collar.’ And that’s when I proposed to her.”
“It was great,” says Nicole.“It ended up being a better story than it would have been.”
When it came time for their wedding, things once again did not go according to plan. The couple got engaged in 2018 and opted for a 2020 ceremony knowing that their ideal venues would all be booked in the interim.
“We picked the date August 1st, so we didn’t really need to start planning until the end of 2019,” says Nicole. “We decided to wait on doing deposits and ordering invitations just in case something happened. Lo and behold...”
Combs, his band, and Nicole were in Europe when COVID-19 began to hold the world hostage in March. After escaping for home just as the U.S. closed its borders, Nicole thought—like many of us—that she would take advantage of the downtime.
“I thought, OK, I can use this time to plan the wedding,” she says. “We were just getting into the thick of it and then two months turned into a couple more months, and then it just kept getting pushed. I started to question myself: should we even go through with this wedding this year? I didn’t want to be that person that had a superspreader event.”
Whether in front of a large crowd or not, the couple knew they wanted to keep their August 1st date. They would just have to scale back. As COVID cases seemed to decline, Nicole moved forward with the planning, ordering and sending out invitations. But a week before the wedding, Florida rolled out new restrictions and limited the size of gatherings. Nicole and Luke had to uninvite 120 people from their nuptials.
“Everything changed. We called it ‘a wedding in a week,’” she says. “We followed the restrictions and thankfully no one got COVID; we just wish we could have had all of our friends and family with us.”
Despite missing their loved ones, the couple reveled in the intimate event.
1 of 2
Tiffany Brittin Photography
2 of 2
Tiffany Brittin Photography
“The small thing made it cool because we literally got to talk to everyone that was there and spend time with each of them,” says Luke. “If there would have been 175 people there, we wouldn’t even have seen half of them. And it was outside in the sunshine. We had the backdrop of the water, so it was still everything we wanted.”
“I couldn’t have imagined it any better,” says Nicole.
When they returned to start their married life in lockdown, they were able to enjoy the newlywed life despite the circumstances.
“We have spent so much time together just this past year,” says Nicole, who rolled out her own Luke Combs x Nicole Collection of merch for his female fans (think: graphic tees, cropped hoodies, Carhartt beanies and more).
“In the beginning of our relationship we really didn’t get to do that. I worked a full-time job, and he was on the road full-time. I’d see him maybe twice a week. The year before we got married and then of course, this year, we got to spend basically every day together. It’s solidified that, obviously we’re great together. And we can make it through a lot.”
Mark Going/ Columbia Sportswear
“I’m so thankful for that,” says Luke, noting that the two have gotten more time to bond over their shared love of fishing, and binge their favorite TV shows together. “To have the time—and not sacrifice the momentum of the music stuff—is really great. I’ve really enjoyed being home and getting to spend all this time with her. It’s been awesome.”
In that time, the two have added to their family—adopting their rescue pup JoJo and some chickens. As for what’s next, they’re figuring it all out as they go.
“I think for us, it’s just try to get back to some kind of normalcy,” says Luke. “Obviously we’re going to have to be on the road a lot when things clear up. For now, we’re just enjoying ourselves.”
“And obviously we want to start a family,” says Nicole. “So whenever the good Lord decides to let us do that, that would be fabulous. But who knows? We’re truly taking it day by day at this point."
“We’re winging it,” adds Luke. “For now we’re just trying to figure out what we’re having for dinner tonight.”