Luke Combs Is “Back In The Saddle” With Hard-Charging New Single, Music Video Features NASCAR Legends Dale Earnhardt Jr. & Richard Petty

Back in the saddle… and back with a classic Luke Combs heater.

Today, he released the lead single from his forthcoming (unofficially  announced) album, which was written alongside frequent collaborators Jonathan Singleton and The Brothers Hunt.

It finds the country superstar ready to ready to get back to doing what he does best, a natural lead single, but the accompanying music video tells the story best, in my humble opinion. It features NASCAR legends Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Richard Petty, and was filmed at Tri-County Motor Speedway in Granite Falls, North Carolina (the home of Eric Church, if that sounds familiar).

Dale Jr. is letting it rip on the track as Luke sings and watches on from the grandstands, and eventually, Petty walks up and decides he wants a turn too. They were the perfect choice to bring the concept of the veteran getting “back in the saddle” to life, and during the Ask Jr. segment of his Dale Jr. Download podcast earlier this week, Dale Earnhardt Jr. was asked about how it came to be. Jr. said Luke texted him and asked if he would be in it, and he was honored to participate.

Jr. wanted it to feel authentic to the song, and he really helped bring it all to life it sounds like… even if he had ulterior motives in choosing this specific track because he’ll be running a late model race there later this year:

“Well, basically Luke texted me and said, ‘Hey man, I’m gonna do a music video for this song.’ He sent me the song, he said, ‘Would you wanna be in it?’ I said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ And so we started talking about what we would do, where we would do it. They thought, man you know, let’s get Next Gen car and go to Charlotte Motor Speedway.

And so we looked around and there weren’t really any Next Gen cars available for us to use. And so I said to Luke, I was like, why don’t we… the song is about getting back in the saddle and kind of a little bit of a comeback story, or you know, kind of like a veteran going back to his roots even. And so I thought, man let’s go to a short track and let’s take one of the late model stock cars. This will be great to shine a light on grassroots racing, to shine a light on light models.

And so we went to Tri-County Motor Speedway, which is about an hour and 15 minutes from the house. We wrapped two of our late model cars identically, so we’d have one car with all the windows out of it and a bunch of cameras mounted all over it and then another car that looked clean and you could film the car from a distance. Luke gets up in the grandstands and walks around the track, and they filmed us in a tunnel and doing all kinds of other stuff.

And then he’s up in the flag stand and I’m making laps. And I’m racing at Tri-County later this year, so I thought, I wanna go somewhere where I can get some laps. And so I ran and I followed a camera car around the track a little bit, we got some shots that way.”

Jr. has been in several other music videos before, including “Show Me What You Got” by Jay-Z alongside Danica Patrick, “The Road I’m On” by 3 Doors Down alongside Tony Stewart and he was even in the video for Carrie Underwood’s song “The Champion.”

I’m extremely biased when I say I think is the best one he’s been in yet, and I love that Luke got back to his roots in North Carolina with two of the best we have… it’s symbolic in terms of the song itself, but it also created a really dang bad*** video.

They’re three of NC’s absolute best, and it’s just incredible to see them all together on this video. It’s been a long time since I cared much about watch a music video, but this… this goes SO hard:

“Back in the Saddle”

The post Luke Combs Is “Back In The Saddle” With Hard-Charging New Single, Music Video Features NASCAR Legends Dale Earnhardt Jr. & Richard Petty first appeared on Whiskey Riff.