“I miss my mom, I miss my dad
I miss the road, I miss my band
Giving hugs and shaking hands
It’s a mystery I suppose
Just how long this thing goes
But there’ll be crowds and there’ll be shows
And there will be light after dark
Someday when we aren’t six feet apart“
Excerpt from “Six Feet Apart” by Luke Combs
Written during the early stages of the pandemic, when lockdown, quarantine and social distancing were quickly becoming the norm, Luke Combs and his band members wrote the song “Six Feet Apart” over Zoom on April 14, 2020. Combs was initially apprehensive about the song because it sounded “too cheesy” but after uploading an acoustic rendition of the song to YouTube it became a hit and more than 2 million people viewed it (Wikipedia).
I remember hearing this song for the first time on the radio while I was driving to Yellowstone National Park. It’s quite possibly one of the first songs to be written with the pandemic in mind and expresses the frustration and sadness caused by social distancing measures and restrictions put in place to curb the spread of Covid-19.
An online BBC news article reports some interesting background information about the origins of “Six Feet Apart”. Concerning the song, Combs said that “the anthem almost came about by accident. ‘That writing session was already booked before the Covid stuff happened, but my mind had been on it,’ he says. ‘The night before, I texted the guys and said, ‘Hey, man, should we do something where we address the elephant in the room?’ And they were like, ‘Oh, that’s perfect because we’ve got this title, Six Feet Apart’. ‘So, somehow, we ended up being on the same page, and I think we wrote it in maybe two hours'” (Savage).
Social Media Trends as of May 11, 2022
Facebook #sixfeetapart: 33,000 people are posting about this
Instagram #sixfeetapart: 96,119 posts
TikTok #sixfeetapart: 30.9 million views
YouTube #sixfeetapart: 290 videos and 213 channels
Google Trends: “six feet apart” became popular during the week of March 15, 2020. During the pandemic, staying six feet apart was the minimum distance to be kept between people for social distancing. When Luke Combs released his hit song on YouTube the following month, the popularity of this term exploded and reached its peak during the week of May 9, 2020.
Sources
Combs, Luke. “Six Feet Apart.” Wikipedia. Last updated: September 30, 2021. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Feet_Apart.
Combs, Luke. “Six Feet Apart.” YouTube. The World Music Star channel. URL: https://youtu.be/dxKfYgnk72Q.
Savage, Mark. “Luke Combs dissects his lockdown anthem Six Feet Apart, one year later.” BBC.com. 27 May 2021. URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57257580.