‘Yellowstone’: Luke Grimes Is Starting a Music Career but Doesn’t Think His Character Kayce Dutton Will Start Singing

Yellowstone‘s Luke Grimes is adding musician to his already impressive resume. He’s not the first actor to have the music bug, and he likely won’t be the last. Soon, fans will get to listen to Grimes’ music as they rush home to watch him portray Kayce Dutton on the hit Paramount Network show. Here’s everything we know about Grimes’ upcoming music career.

Luke Grimes is starting playing music when he was a teenager

During an interview with ET, Grimes watched a 2008 interview of his 24-year-old self, revealing that he started playing the drums in church when he was 13 or 14, as well as guitar. He also sings to himself when no one is watching. “Shower, car, bedroom, hallway. Whatever else no one’s around, I’m singing, you better believe it,” younger Grimes said.

However, Grimes was also in a band before he became an actor. “It was around that time when the alt-country thing was really going on. Wilco and Ryan Adams were really big then and we were kind of like that,” Grimes told Rolling Stone (per Yahoo! News). “I played guitar too and helped write songs for the band, so I got to be more than just the drummer. It was a cool experience.”

Clearly, the music bug never died in Grimes.

Grimes is starting a music career

So far, Grimes has played all kinds of characters. Even the ones he initially wanted to play when he went into acting. But he’ll be playing a different role, one outside of drama, very soon.

“When you’re a little boy and you want to be an actor, what are some things you want to play? A cowboy, a soldier,” Grimes explained to ET. “It’s kind of all of the dream roles wrapped into one. He’s just an emotionally complex guy but also a badass. It’s all good stuff.”

When asked if Grimes’s Kacey will ever sing on Yellowstone in the future, Grimes said, “I think it would be weird if [my Yellowstone character] Kayce started singing. But here pretty soon, you’ll see Luke singing.” 

Asked whose idea it is, Grimes pointed to his 24-year-old self in the 2008 interview. “You heard him, he told you,” Grimes laughed.

The show has already seen Ryan Bingham, who plays Walker, show off his guitar playing skills, so it would be great if Kayce started churning out a tune here and there. But Grimes is correct; that isn’t Kayce.

Grimes was the drummer of an alt-country band

We don’t yet know what kind of music Grimes is looking to release, but it’s safe to say he’ll go down the country route.

Yahoo! News wrote that Grimes is “working with the management team behind Midland, Hailey Whitters, and his Yellowstone costar Ryan Bingham (Range Media Partners, who also represent Grimes for film and television), and has been busy writing new songs. He’ll try his hand at co-writing in Nashville on an upcoming trip from his home in Montana.”

Being a part of Yellowstone since 2018 has “shaped the music that the Dayton, Ohio, native both listens to and writes.” Grimes and his wife are massive fans of Colter Wall. However, his father brought him up on the classics.

“I hate this word, but the ‘secular’ music that I was allowed to listen to as a kid was Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash,” he said. “That’s the stuff my dad grew up on in the Appalachian Mountains. When he didn’t have to be a pastor, he was playing that sort of folk and country-rock.”

Now that Yellowstone is on a break after the eventful season 4, Grimes has begun to record demos of songs on his iPhone and is getting advice from friends in the music business he chose not to name.

Fans can already hear Grimes on “Reckless Road,” a song he wrote for a TV pilot with singer Jesse Cole, a friend and ex-bandmate. It was bootlegged and released online. “Someone ripped it off of Netflix and put it on YouTube,” Grimes said.

So, Grimes could very well become the next big country star. Whenever he records his music and releases his debut album, fans will welcome it with open arms. However, if we can’t see Kacey sing a tune on Yellowstone, maybe they’ll play one of Grimes’ songs in the background during a great Kacey scene.