Yellowstone, Marshals Star Luke Grimes Shows Soft Side

There’s plenty of pain on Luke Grimes new Redbird album, but a song he wrote for his 18-month-old son Rigel adds a bit of sweet you might not expect if you only know him as a Yellowstone and Marshals character named Kayce Dutton.

The actor sat down with Taste of Country’s Adison Haager, co-host of the Dutton Rules Podcast. The full interview will drop on YouTube on Tuesday (April 7) but this story was too sweet to hold on to.

• Redbird (released on April 3) dives deep into his personal story, including the 2022 death of his father.
• This is his second album, following his self-titled project (2024).
• Marshals airs on Sunday nights on CBS.

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Luke Grimes’ Wife + Kids

Redbird includes an acoustic song called “Hummingbird” that is clearly inspired by fatherhood. “He loves music, like for real,” Grimes, says of his son, Rigel Randolph Grimes.

“This is not me like wishing, you know, like pushing something on him.”

The actor and his wife Bianca (married 2019) welcomed their first child in 2024 but don’t often share pictures or stories of their life as parents. They live privately in rural Montana, where people know him well enough to not care about his celebrity.

The not-quite-2-year-old has a Yoto Player, which is a music player for kids that comes with physical cards so they have a tangible thing to connect to. Those are customizable.

Luke Grimes’ Song About His Son

“So we put ‘Hummingbird’ on one and he loves it. He’ll just point and say, ‘Da da da da.’ He knows which card it is,” Grimes shares, smiling.

“Hummingbird, oh hummingbird / I want you to fly / High up as you wanna go / In the big blue sky,” he sings as he enters the first chorus.

“It’s very flattering in a way to have my son love the music and not just the song that’s for him. My first album, he just carries the sleeve around and asks to play it all the time. And it’s amazing. Like, it’s not lost on me how cool that is.”

Listen to “Hummingbird” below. Grimes shares that his son’s love for music is unusually strong, but that’s far from his only charming gift.

“Oh, man. He’s really funny. He’s hilarious. This kid is a comedian,” he tells ToC. Like, he’s just constantly trying to make us laugh. And when we do laugh, he just does that thing over and over.”

Like so many new parents, the Marshals star and his real-life wife are amazed by how quick their son changes and taken aback by his strong personality.

“I don’t know. It’s hard to put your finger on like what happens to you when you become a parent, because it’s not one thing. It’s all the things and it’s not all at once,” he shares later in the interview while talking about how fatherhood affects his acting.

“Like I definitely look back to before I had him though, I’m like I’m a very different person.”

In so many ways, Luke Grimes has grown up with Kayce Dutton. The songs on Redbird showcase his maturity and introduce him as much more than the tragic character we’ve watched on television for more than eight years.