Luke Bryan photo courtesy of Capitol Nashville.

“That kid,” LeClaire Bryan, his mother, told The Albany Herald in Georgia, “was a piece of work.”

Luke’s newest piece of work — his sophomore album, Doin’ My Thing — will be released on Tuesday, and Luke will celebrate with a big homecoming event, signing autographs in the afternoon and performing a concert at the Lee County High School that night.

He returns to Georgia a star, but he would not have achieved that distinction if he hadn’t had a do-or-die attitude about pursuing his dream. He spent a good deal of time waiting tables when he first arrived in Nashville, and he still won’t show his mom the apartment where he lived when he first moved to Music City.

“Sure, there were some not-so-fun times,” Luke acknowledged, “but I can’t say that I ever got to a point where I wanted to give up and move back home.”

Luke’s breakthrough year was 2007, when he earned his first hit with the hangover special, “All My Friends Say,” and landed at No. 1 as a writer of Billy Currington’s “Good Directions.” Luke’s “Do I,” his first single from Doin’ My Thing, has been the No. 1 video on GAC’s Top 20 Country Countdown for the past six weeks. He co-wrote it with a couple of fellow Georgians: Lady Antebellum’s Charles Kelley and Dave Haywood.

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