Luke Bryan photo courtesy of Capitol Nashville.

Credit Luke Bryan for thinking long-term. His 2007 debut, I’ll Stay Me, brought him a pair of hit singles, which would make just about any new artist happy.

But while Luke was understandably pleased with that result, he also had a bit of a concern. Neither of the songs was particularly serious — “All My Friends Say” is a rowdy ode to a hangover; “Country Man” was accompanied by a video with a pig — and Luke didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a comic.

“I had been flirting with getting a party-boy image,” he told CMA Closeup. “We wanted to show that I was able to sing a little more than people may have realized. You don’t ever want to be labeled a one-trick pony.”

Luke broke the mold with “Do I,” the first single from autumn’s Doin’ My Thing. The ballad is a weighty one in which the singer finds himself at a crossroads with an unresponsive partner. It became his first No. 1 single as an artist (he also wrote Billy Currington’s chart-topping “Good Directions”) and this week became his first gold single. Of course, hitting the top might well call for a little No. 1 party for Luke and Lady Antebellum: Charles Kelley and Dave Haywood co-wrote the song, and Hillary Scott added backing vocals.

“With [Dave and Charles] being from Georgia and myself being from Georgia, we just wanted to see where that would take us,” Luke said of the co-writing session. “So I called them up one day and they came over to my house. We sat on the front porch, drank a couple of beers and threw some ideas around. The idea of ‘Do I’ came up, and we knocked it out right there on the front porch. We knew we had something cool and pretty special right when we wrote it.”

Luke has not, for the record, completely abandoned the funny stuff in his songs. The follow-up single, “Rain Is A Good Thing,” is light-hearted, kind of convoluted and rhymes “whiskey” and “frisky.” It won’t leave anyone rolling in the aisles, but it might break a bad mood on the way home from work.