For the third time in his career, Luke Bryan debuts at Number One on the all-genre Billboard 200 chart with his new album, Kill The Lights, which sold 320,000 copies its first week. Kill The Lights is the third-largest album debut in 2015, next to the R&B/hip hop releases from Drake and Kendrick Lamar. It’s also the highest Country album debut in the last two years, since Luke’s own Crash My Party album debuted at Number One in August of 2013.
The interesting thing is that Luke actually started working on Kill The Lights before Crash My Party. He tells us: [“I almost started some songs on Kill the Lights before I made Crash My Party. You never know when an old song that you’ve been working on if you sit back down and work with it if it will be something that makes an album and that was – we had that happen on this album. We start finding songs and you put them on hold and then you put them in a little file in your computer. I will make a little file that says ‘next album,’ and I’ll start dragging those songs over into it and listening to them, and so we start that – I don’t know if we ever stop it. I don’t think you can ever be truly prepared enough going into an album. We get ready for our albums the same way, listen to as many songs as we can, write as many songs as we can, come up with great ideas to push the envelope on stuff and there you have it and then you have an album.”] SOUNDCUE (:51 OC: . . . have an album.)
Luke co-wrote six of the 13 songs on Kill The Lights.
On Friday (August 21st), Luke’s Kick The Dust Up tour begins a two-night stint at Philips Arena in Atlanta.
FAST FACTS
- Luke’s Crash My Party album produced six consecutive Number One singles and has been certified Double Platinum will sales of over two million copies with eight million digital downloads.
- The new single off Kill The Lights is called “Strip It Down.”
