Luke Grimes says a pilot shot in Nashville more than a decade ago — a project that never became a series — gave him his first real chance to write and record songs for television, and those early efforts now sit at the center of his music life as he releases Red Bird and stars in CBS’s Marshals.
Grimes, best known for playing Kayce Dutton on Yellowstone and now the lead in Marshals, traced that beginning to a pilot called Outlaw Country, filmed in Nashville around 2011 or 2012. "It was kind of amazing. John Linson, the producer, he had Sons of Anarchy and [became] a producer on Yellowstone, he hired me for this pilot. He had this idea for a singer-songwriter, a Townes Van Zandt, Blaze Foley-type guy, who the way he made money was criminal activity. He was in a gang. That’s why it was called Outlaw Country," Grimes said.
The detail matters because the pilot, while never ordered to series, allowed Grimes to do something he hadn’t done before on screen: write and record original material. "They let me write and record the songs for it. I was in bands all through acting school in L.A., I was always in bands, played drums and wrote with the band, but that was the first time I wrote a song that I cut or was for anything," he said. He named two of those early pieces — "Wild Grass" and "Reckless Road" — as part of that first foray. "Which sounds very outlaw country. It’s not bad for a first foray," he added.
That first foray has stretched into a small recorded catalog: Grimes released a self-titled debut album in 2024 and followed with Red Bird, released in April. Red Bird contains 10 songs, each co-written by Grimes, with collaborators including producer Dave Cobb and songwriter Jessie Jo Dillon. One track from Red Bird, "Haunted," was featured in Marshals, which premiered earlier this year and airs Sundays from 8 to 9 p.m. ET/PT on CBS. Marshals is also available live and on-demand on Paramount+ for premium subscribers and on-demand the day after the episode airs for Paramount+ subscribers.
The contrast here is raw: Outlaw Country never went forward — "they never ordered up any more episodes" — yet it provided the first real outlet for Grimes’ songwriting, and those songs would later help shape his recorded work and television placements. The pilot’s failure to become a series created a gap between the creative opportunity and any ongoing television paycheck, but it did not end the music. Instead, the pilot was a one-off that seeded a longer arc in his career.
Context helps explain the arc. Grimes built a profile in television as Kayce Dutton on Yellowstone, and he now headlines Marshals on CBS. That visibility changed the scale and reach of his music: a song placed in a network series gives listeners a different route to discover an artist than a standalone record release. For Grimes, the path began in Nashville about 15 years ago and led to studio sessions with established collaborators, culminating in a 10-track record released this April.
The tension is simple and human. A project that produced no series contract nonetheless allowed an actor to make music that later found a commercial and broadcast home. John Linson — who hired Grimes for the pilot and had been a producer on Sons of Anarchy before becoming a producer on Yellowstone — gave Grimes the on-set latitude to write and record, yet the production never expanded into more episodes.
The conclusion is clear: the Outlaw Country pilot did what pilots are supposed to do in one sense — it tested a performance and a creative idea — but its lasting legacy is not a series order. It is the moment it allowed Luke Grimes to write and record songs for picture for the first time, a step that has grown into a recorded catalogue, collaborations with Dave Cobb and Jessie Jo Dillon, a 2024 debut album, an April release called Red Bird with 10 co-written songs, and a track — "Haunted" — that now lives inside the Marshals episodes millions can watch on CBS and Paramount+.
