“This Project Brings Me Back to the Part of Luke's Life That Was Really Joyful”: Luke Bell’s Family and Friends Remember the Late Singer-Songwriter As He Truly Was

“I'm sure you've all been dying to see me / I bet you've all been wondering where I'm at / I heard things just ain't the same without me / Hold your hats, the party's on, the king is back…”

Those words, riding in on swells of galloping guitar this past September, carried with them a voice that had felt far away for years. Against a shuddering rhythm and bounding strings, ‘The King Is Back’ defiantly unfurled, like a sapling through asphalt, and for just 2 minutes and 50 seconds, brought Luke Bell back to life.

The song sounds determined and resolute, like a victory cry emerging from the struggles that life often deals. In reality, ‘The King Is Back’ was a rather conflicting number in the singer-songwriter’s tumultuous saga. Near the end of his brief but seminal recording career, the proudly – almost arrogantly – triumphant anthem became a source of paranoia for the musician.

Bell would come to record the track in late 2015, occasionally playing it live to those lucky enough to hear it. But, when his record label pushed for it to be released on his self-titled album in 2016, he was resistant and would, ultimately, refuse. According to words his mother, Carol, wrote, he believed the song to be dangerous, fearing that its lyrics would be construed as claims that he was Jesus Christ and those who were after him would attempt to take his life. This was an initial glimpse into the psychosis that would come to greatly affect the artist.

Years before, the Wyoming-raised musician had spent the mid-2010s persistently carving out a space for himself and his sound in musical circles from Austin, Texas to Nashville, Tennessee. He would independently release two albums in that time, before dropping his namesake debut. The 2016 release, which featured honky tonk hits like ‘Sometimes’ and ‘Where Ya Been?’, as well as the now Western standard ‘The Bullfighter’, was met with wide acclaim and would begin to solidify his stardom.

Just as quickly as success found him, however, a darkness would also begin to take hold. Around this time, the loss of his father to cancer and a growing tug-of-war with mental illness made life in the spotlight increasingly difficult for Bell. He soon retreated from the public eye and spent several years in and out of touch with loved ones, occasionally serving stints in jail or psychiatric facilities and experiencing bouts of homelessness.

When Bell began to make headlines in late August 2022, it wasn’t for some new musical feat or upcoming career release. Instead, it was to inform the public that the once-burgeoning, then-estranged singer-songwriter had gone missing. Bell’s death would be reported a week later. He was 32 years old.

‘The King Is Back’ would be the last song played at his funeral service, soundtracking the final procession as family and friends departed from the ceremony. Still, it remained unreleased for years. Today, it serves as the lead single and title song of his upcoming posthumous collection.

Assembled by Carol Bell, alongside the artist's former manager Brian Buchanan, the 28-track album features songs that were recorded between November 2013 and August 2016, many of which never found homes on Bell’s previous releases. The collection – full of heart-heavy and world-wearied ballads, as well as jubilant and playful odes to life and love – showcases an artist not only in his prime, but also deeply in touch with the complexities of this existence.

With this release, Bell and his music remain alive, his spirit and his story intrinsically woven throughout the compilation. And, despite the adverse feelings surrounding the song in the end, no one track speaks to Bell’s time on this Earth quite like ‘The King Is Back’.

Like the tune’s proud protagonist, Bell knew what it meant to overcome. He understood better than most what it was like to struggle, to suck the marrow from the bone just to get by, to have to fake it in front of the masses then quietly battle his demons alone. As the song insists, “I've been poor and I've been angry / I can guarantee you that.” Still, he kept on swinging, kept on fighting, until he couldn’t anymore.

The story of Luke Bell is not solely one of mental illness. While those final years depict a very real narrative of a human being grappling with an inner turmoil, they often overshadow the days of boundless genius, the years of unquenchable tenacity and a lifetime – however brief – of uninhibited love.

Here, his family and some of his close friends discuss the real Luke Bell: the one-of-a-kind son, the lovable brother, the irreplaceable companion and the incomparable artist.

“Hold your hats, the party's on, the king is back…”

Carol Bell remembers her son as a born performer.

“From the time he was old enough to walk,” she explains to us, “it felt like everything Luke did was with the idea in mind that there might be an audience somewhere.”

She describes an enthusiastic little boy who almost never left their house without a costume on, an occasionally frustrating teen who could disrupt class with his penchant for grandstanding and a bold – at times presumptuous – young man who would sometimes elbow his way into situations uninvited.

When he was about 14 years old, Carol and her late husband, David, took Luke and his younger sister, Jane, to see folk legend John Prine perform in nearby Billings, Montana, about an hour-and-a-half away from their Cody, Wyoming home. In between the opener and Prine’s appearance onstage, Luke slipped away. He came back a while later with a secret to tell his mom.

She says, “He leans over and whispers in my ear, ‘Mom, do you want to shake the hand that shook John Prine's hand?’ And I said, ‘What? How'd you shake John Prine's hand?’”

Apparently, during the show’s brief changing of acts, Luke popped into the alleyway alongside the venue. There, he watched Prine’s limo pull up, saw the artist get out and head for a backstage door. He simply stood in the way, held out his hand to the man and said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Prine.”

When Carol asked what happened next, Luke replied with, “Well, what could he do? He shook my hand.”

She remembers how that boldness arose again a few years later when Luke, upon hearing that country great Jerry Jeff Walker was being flown in for a surprise concert at a neighboring family’s party, crashed the event. The night apparently ended with the aspiring singer-songwriter finagling the spotlight and playing a handful of songs for the revered songsmith.

That was Luke. He seems to have had a jaw-dropping audacity and sparkling charisma, but Carol explains that he could also be a nuisance.

“He made assumptions,” she says. “He would show up for dinner with friends without letting you know that he was bringing friends. He would crash your party. He just assumed he was welcome everywhere he went, that once he got there, you'd be glad to have him. While that usually was true by the end of the evening, it maybe wasn't true at the beginning.”

She recalls one Christmas when Luke, at the last minute, cancelled his plans to be home for the holiday. As the Yuletide celebrations neared, he wasn’t answering his phone or returning his parents’ calls. Then, on the night of Christmas Eve, a truck full of Luke’s hometown buddies – and a large box – pulled into Carol and David’s driveway.

After much coaxing from the friends, the Bells reluctantly came out of the house and into the cold, where Luke was waiting in that box to surprise them.

“I didn't know whether to kill him or hug him,” she remembers. “I feel like his whole life was about that moment, even when he was a little boy.”

Carol says she doesn’t know where that side of her son came from. Luke’s father was born into a long line of ministers and farmers and his mother’s family was made up of longtime ranchers.

“We are not a family of show people,” she says. “Often, I just spent time thinking, ‘Where did this kid come from?’”

However, she remembers thinking, most of all, how fortunate she was, saying, “He has such an interesting way of looking at the world, and he's so quirky and weird and funny, and I feel so lucky I get to watch this.”

Luke spent his upbringing in Wyoming, never truly fitting in. From a young age, Carol says, “It was stressful for him to realize that, in order to belong, he might have to turn it down a little bit.” Still, throughout his school years, he was unwilling to tamp down who he was or conform to the status quo around him. As he found his way through Nashville and among its music community, he also found his people. In turn, Carol found a sense of peace knowing that her fearless, occasionally vexing, Luke had discovered a home among other outliers.

“When people share stories about Luke,” she says, “what's heartwarming is that they saw him, flaws and all, and they felt – like I did – like it was worth it.”

Many of Jane Bell’s early memories with her brother include, as it so often goes, trudging along after him and his friends. It may have irritated them at the time, but she assures, “They put up with me.”

She describes Luke as a great sibling, but growing up, he could also be mischievous and would sometimes trick – or “Tom Sawyer” her, as she put it – into doing his chores or the things he didn’t want to do.

Jane shares how, for the first two years of his life, Luke was the adored only child. “When I came along,” she explains, “I think there was some typical jealousy of the cute baby.” She says she still has a scar from the time he tried to shave her as a baby.

As they grew up, however, they found a common ground in music. The Bell family are music lovers with eclectic tastes, so Luke and Jane were raised around all kinds of sounds and taken to live performances as often as the family could. The siblings were placed in piano lessons as kids, and by the time they were both in high school, guitar classes had been added to the mix.

Jane recalls that this was when Luke really began taking music seriously – writing songs, singing, and sometimes resenting having to perform with his little sister.

“He got all the songwriting genes,” she says. “He was always really creative in that way. He wrote really interesting lyrics from the get-go, but when Luke started, he was a terrible singer.”

Singing was something that had come naturally to Jane from an early age, which she says had a tendency to stoke Luke’s envy. Especially when, in an effort to bolster the shy young Jane’s natural talent, family members were more generous towards her with their compliments.

“If we sang together, my family members – like aunts, uncles – they weren't really shy about saying, ‘Jane, you're so much better.’ I think they were trying to hype me up. They didn't do it in a nasty way to Luke, but I think he caught wind of some of that. So for a while, he didn't love playing together.”

Once he left home to pursue music, cutting his teeth in the bars of Austin and Nashville, that perceived animosity fell away and the siblings found connection through music once again.

“He was so confident and he had gotten so good that he didn't care anymore,” Jane says. “Then we had a lot of fun when he would come home and visit.”

As Luke settled into life in Nashville, the two would talk on the phone about music, passing along songs to one another and sharing ideas and inspirations. Whenever Jane would visit him in Music City, he would call her up on stage at his staple haunt, Santa’s Pub, to perform with him. Sometimes, he would get off the stage entirely and let her have a turn in the spotlight alongside his bandmates.

“We had a few really great years of enjoying that together,” she remembers, adding, “I've struggled with my musical inspiration since Luke's been gone.”

Mike Vanata met Luke Bell in middle school, but they didn’t actually connect until high school where they were, as Mike explains, “ships in the night.”

As teenagers, they ran in similar circles and frequented many of the same parties. It was at one of these get-togethers, a gathering held at Mike’s parents’ home while they were out of town, that Mike first recognized Luke’s draw to music.

Sometime during the night, he pulled out a guitar and worked up an acoustic cover of Snoop Dogg’s ‘Gin and Juice’. “After he played that, I was like, ‘Hey, Luke, you know any other songs,’” Mike shares. “He's like, ‘Nope, that's the only one.’”

He then proceeded to tell Mike that, one day, he was going to be a country singer. “Well, you should probably learn more than one song”, Mike replied. Luke did.

After high school, the aspiring musician attended the University of Wyoming, but he would end up dropping out and traveling to Austin to pursue his passion. When Luke returned to Cody and reconnected with Mike, he came armed with the makings of a musical catalogue.

“He had brought back a crap-ton of songs that were pretty amazing,” Mike remembers. United by a shared love of music, they began to grow closer.

“Luke was one of the first people I filmed and recorded,” he shares.

Mike would capture many of Luke’s early performances as a newfound songsmith. Today, he is a director and cinematographer, and those videos would mark the unofficial beginnings of the popular channel, Western AF, a platform he co-founded to document and archive the work of today’s singer-songwriters.

“I would film a video of Luke and I couldn't wait to do the next one with him,” Mike recalls. “He gave me a lot of purpose to my filmmaking that I didn't know that I had. He really inspired that.”

Some of the stills Mike occasionally captured of the artist during these times – images of the artist looking captivatingly at ease – have been used to accompany The King Is Back release. “Those are images of the real Luke,” he shares, “the Luke I wanted everybody to know and meet.”

Through the years, the two would be bonded, with Mike considered a member of Luke’s chosen family. That seems to be what Luke often did, pulled people in, gave them a space to feel warm and welcome and nurtured a sense of belonging that he seemingly found absent during his youth.

“The music community that I've been exposed to through my work on Western AF, it's just painted with Luke's legacy and heart in it,” Mike says, adding that it seems like every other person he meets has a Luke tale to tell. “He, without knowing, created a community for me to be a part of, and I thank him every day for that.”

Carter Brallier’s first impression of Luke Bell arrived alongside a flop.

It was a Sunday night at Santa’s Pub in Nashville, and Luke, arriving highly recommended, was welcomed to perform alongside the bar’s house band, the Ice Cold Pickers. Carter is the group’s longtime bassist.

However, Luke, as Carter remembers, didn’t do too well.

“He came in with a bunch of gusto and confidence and then just didn't deliver,” he shares. “He forgot the words, didn't know the chords to the song. Afterwards, when he got off stage, the guitar player leaned over, and he was like, ‘I don't know if we should have him up again.’”

Despite the initial fumble, Luke didn’t fold. He continued to get up on stage alongside the Pickers and work on his craft. In the process, Luke and Carter became fast friends. They would even live together for a while, sharing a house for about two-and-a-half years.

Sundays at Santa’s turned into showcases around town, with Carter eventually joining Luke’s touring band as his star began to rise.

Carter doesn’t recall a distinct separation between man and musician when it came to Luke. “I feel like the musician and the person were very much the same,” he explains. “He didn't change on stage or off.”

He remembers how Luke approached many things with a single-minded intensity. That was especially true with his music. “If his mind was on something, there was nothing else around it,” he shares. “If he was writing a song, that's all he's thinking about until it's written. And then when he's working on a melody, he would be singing in the house the entire day until he got the melody he wanted. If he was learning a guitar lick, he was doing that until it was learned.”

Carter often witnessed Luke’s genius in action. He watched his friend pluck songs straight from his life, molding late night memories with friends or personal reckonings into masterful tunes. Much of Luke’s catalogue feels like his story. As Carter explains, that’s because a great deal of it was.

“Ninety-five per cent of his songs are insanely autobiographical,” he says. “Most of his songs are just something that happened that night or something about him.”

Just like a smell has the ability to bring certain memories to the fore, Luke’s songs have a similar effect on Carter. They take the bassist back to certain moments in time, like when they recorded their self-proclaimed “Tin Dog Sessions”. That spontaneous day in the studio resulted in four or five of the songs, including the deliciously charming ‘Orangutang’, that appear on The King Is Back release.

“I think the whole studio smelled like the tequila coming out of our pores,” he remembers of that hungover romp, “but that was an awesome session.”

The classic ‘Where Ya Been?’ is another that triggers fond memories for Carter. During live performances, he says, there were moments when Luke’s trademark confidence would bloom across his face. “With certain songs and certain lines, you'd see him smile really big as he was singing it,” he explains. “It's because he was even going, ‘Yeah, I wrote the hell out of that song.’”

Whenever Luke would sing the song’s “I are, I are leanin' on the end of the bar”, what Carter describes as a “shit-eating grin” would split his face. “He’d look over at me like, ‘Yeah, I wrote that.’”

That’s the Luke Bell, with all that unchecked confidence and brilliant nerve, that’s tangible throughout much of The King Is Back. While sadness and a world-weariness is present in some of these songs, many of the album’s tracks were born from a time before success, notoriety and personal turmoil, so there is also a great sense of bravery, hope and a willingness to find the levity in life.

While compiling this collection, Luke’s mom, Carol, recognized this palpable joy. “When I hear his voice, I'm reminded how much fun he was having,” she says, adding that, following the years of pain that came with seeing her son suffer, this album has been a blessing in many ways. “It feels like this project brings me back around to the part of Luke's life that was really joyful and happy, fulfilling and rewarding.”

She also looks to the community her son created through his music as a source of healing. “That's a real shot in the arm right now for all of us,” she shares, “That's what Luke's songs are about for me: what it's like to be lonely and what it's like to be in connection and in community. I think the hero of Luke’s music is connection and community.”

Following the artist's passing, Carol and Jane Bell founded the Luke Bell Memorial Affordable Counseling Program in an effort to help bring low-cost therapy to the people of the Bighorn Basin that Luke called home. All proceeds from The King Is Back release will go to benefit the non-profit organization.

'The King Is Back' arrives Friday, Nov. 7, via Thirty Tigers.

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