Luke Combs started playing guitar at age 21 on advice from his mother.

It’s never too late to learn guitar. Just ask Luke Combs.

In an interview with Clint Black for Talking in Circles, which premiered on Friday, October 10, the “Beautiful Crazy” singer reflected on when he started playing guitar and what inspired him to wait until he was 21.

At the time, Combs, now 35, was working two jobs and had dropped out of Appalachian State University.

He then moved to Nashville with a small following and picked up the guitar at his mother’s urging, where two major country stars started strumming at the same age.

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“I started playing the guitar 11 years ago. I’d never played it before. All my life I was singing just as a casual thing to do for fun. It made me happy and other people liked it when I played the guitar, that kind of thing. Girls thought it was cool, but it wasn’t really that for me,” Combs said.

“So I sang a lot, and then I picked up the guitar. I was in college, and college was coming to an end. It was like, you’re 22, it’s time to get out of here, you’re a creepy old man now.”

Combs also said his parents, Rhonda and Lee Combs, gave him a $50 Ybanez guitar when he was in middle school. He took a lesson once and decided at that time, “I’m not going to do it because my parents want me to do this and it’s not cool.”

“So I still had that guitar in the closet, and my mom came out and said, ‘I don’t understand why you’re sitting there grumpy. You know Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, they didn’t start playing guitar until they were 21,'” he said.

Combs added, “And I was 21 years old and I thought, ‘Wow, I’m so much better than those guys.'” I don’t even know if that’s true. I don’t know if they actually learned (at the time), or my mom was like, she’ll say anything to keep me from doing something. So I started playing. ”

Combs’ mother wasn’t entirely wrong about when the country’s stars started playing guitar.

According to East Tennessee State University’s alumni page, Chesney, 57, didn’t start playing guitar until he was a student there. “One year for Christmas he was given a guitar and began practicing several hours a day,” the website says. “He then joined ETSU’s bluegrass band, where he learned to write songs.”

Meanwhile, McGraw, 58, started playing guitar while in college. According to an Instagram video shared in September, he sold his ring during his freshman year of high school and “bought a guitar for $20.”

“I spent the whole summer learning 50 or 60 songs on the guitar. That was my repertoire,” he said.

Combs said he taught himself how to play the guitar, even though he knew nothing about it. He spent all summer playing on his balcony, and by the following year he was writing and performing his own songs.

Combs’ EP The Prequel is now available to stream