Dierks Bentley is a Student of Songwriting

Dierks Bentley has built his career on authenticity. For more than 20 years, the singer/songwriter has been a mainstay on country radio, notching 21 No. 1 songs. His catalog spans the emotional spectrum with reflective and personal anthems like “I Hold On” and “Living” alongside dynamic fan favorites and feel-good, multi-week chart-toppers “Drunk on a Plane” and “Somewhere on a Beach.” 

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Bentley is known as much for his thoughtful songwriting as he is for his engaging live show, which combines elements of contemporary country and bluegrass music. “Our goal is to make the bluegrass with the kickass,” he tells American Songwriter. Fittingly, he’s a frequent performer at the Station Inn, Nashville’s famed 175-person capacity bluegrass venue, and an in-demand arena headliner, where he accomplishes this goal every night.

The singer celebrates a major milestone in 2023 with the 20th anniversary of his first No. 1 hit, the major-label debut single “What Was I Thinkin’.” Bentley, who penned the song with producer Brett Beavers and Deric Ruttan, calls the energetic acoustic-driven track “timeless” and says the song “was a template for the rest of my career.” 

“What Was I Thinkin’” blends Bentley’s love of bluegrass with country storytelling. The track features in-demand bluegrass player and producer-engineer Randy Kohrs on dobro while it details a first date with a beauty from South Alabama. The vivid song has the womanseated beside Bentley in a little white tank top, forever cementing the concert attire of his female fans. 

Just as “What Was I Thinkin’” remains a staple in his live show, Bentley continues to highlight talent from the bluegrass world within the songs and albums that followed. His 10th studio album, Gravel & Gold, is no exception. The 14-track project, available now, is a combination of Bentley’s versatile influences and illustrious career.

“[Gravel & Gold] being the 10th album, I really wanted it to be a combination of all the previous sounds and to lean on some of the more traditional stuff and lean on some of the bluegrass, as well as some of the more innovative sounds,” Bentley says. “It captures a little bit of what made me but also shows me trying to branch off into newer terrain as a songwriter.”

Songs like album closer “High Note,” with Grammy-winning bluegrass singer and guitarist Billy Strings, and “Roll On,” which features Bluegrass Music Hall of Famer Sam Bush on mandolin, highlight Bentley’s bluegrass influences. Other tracks, like the lead single “Gold” and the clever breakup anthem “Heartbreak Drinking Tour,” exemplify his staying power as an in-demand country songwriter.

Gravel & Goldhas been a long time coming. Bentley, who relocated to Colorado with his family during the early days of the pandemic, says he took a break from writing songs in 2020. Instead of working on new music, he embraced the uninterrupted time with family and the outdoors. The Bentleys went on frequent camping trips around the Centennial State and spent ample time hiking and bike-riding. 

“As a songwriter, you have to live to write songs,” he says. “You can’t just make this stuff up. It just feels inauthentic, and people can see through that; country fans can see through that faster than anybody else if a song feels contrived. … The pandemic came at the right time for me to reset and to go get some more experiences.” 

Those experiences can be heard throughout much of Gravel & Gold, including songs “Still” and “Sun Sets in Colorado.” On the latter Bentley sings, My heart beats in Tennessee / But my sun sets in Colorado.“Sun Sets in Colorado” was written specifically for Bentley by Ross Copperman, Tommy Lee James, and Josh Osborne. The track also features Bush on mandolin.

“A great song is a great song, I don’t care where it comes from,” Bentley says. “I just want the brick. I need the bricks to build a house so give me good bricks. [‘Sun Sets in Colorado’] sounds like something I wrote, but those guys wrote it with me in mind, which is a big compliment. It’s right on the nose and it’s one of my favorite tracks on the record because lyrically it’s great, but production-wise it has bluegrass elements. Sam Bush … he’s on the track and it really was just a great song.”

The poetic ballad “Still,” penned early in the album process by Bentley, Jeff Hyde, Ryan Tyndell, and Jeremy Spillman via Zoom, further exemplifies the impact of Colorado on the singer’s life. It also showcases how he’s most at home outdoors.

When there’s no peace to be found
I head for hallowed ground
I still feel at home up on some lonely hill
In the blink of an eye, my head’s clear as the sky
Like the trees with no breeze, my heart is still
Where the world’s the way God made it still

Bentley says “Still” is his favorite track on Gravel & Gold. He admits to being “stuck” while writing the song’s second verse. “I was in Colorado, and I took my laptop and I walked out my front door to this view of these 13,000-foot mountains,” he recalls. “This is what we needed to capture in the second verse, the rollin’ Rocky River.” 

As he explained the view to his co-writers, the quartet came up with the song’s picturesque second verse. It’s a personal lyric to Bentley, as he wrote it about the spot in the mountains where he feels most at peace.

There’s nothing like the sound of a rollin’ Rocky River
To help my worries roll right off my back
Let that crisp air take my breath away each morning
And dip that mountain sunrise in my coffee black

“The natural world to me is the real world,” he admits. “I’m just so sick of being in cities. … Finding peace and finding myself in the stillness, that song is me to a T. That said, when I came back to Nashville, I’ve never been happier being back here. I just really needed to balance the scales a little bit. 

“I’ve spent so much time on asphalt and parking lots and concrete and cities that I needed to tip the scales back in a more favorable balance. Being up on some lonely hill by myself is what my soul needed and recognizing that and getting that time was really important to me, and I feel like the song captured it.”

When Bentley returned to Nashville in March 2021, he got more serious about writing songs for his 10th project. He also went into the studio three separate times over the course of the album’s production. The singer says he didn’t have all the songs he needed or the right sound for the project during the first two sessions. 

Hit singles “Gone” and “Beers on Me,” released in 2020 and 2021 respectively, bought him more time to find that sound to make the album he wanted. He served as producer for the third studio session while the project includes additional production from Beavers, Copperman, Jon Randall, and F. Reid Shippen.

A writing retreat in Colorado with Copperman, HARDY, Ashley Gorley, and Luke Dick helped provide some of the album’s songs, including “Same Ol’ Me,” “Roll On,” “Heartbreak Drinking Tour,” and “Something Real.” Meanwhile, aspects of the first two studio sessions—like the mesmerizing two-and-a-half-minute instrumental jam at the end of “High Note” with Bush, Strings, and Jerry Douglas—made the final tracking session.

“There’s a little bit of a blend, like a good whiskey,” Bentley notes. “Some of this is blended but a lot of it came from the last session and it really just comes down to the right songs.”

“Gold” was one of the last songs penned for the project. Written with Dick, Gorley, and Copperman, “Gold” came together organically. Bentley says Dick had a melody idea, but the group had no lyrics or hook. At one point, the word “gold” popped up. While Dick and Copperman worked on the track’s production, Bentley and Gorley tried to spin the storyline into metaphorical gold. Soon the lyrics might be gravel, but it feels like gold came.

Photo by Robby Klein / Greenroom PR

“Those are my favorite songs to write,” Bentley says. “They’re the hardest ones to write [but] definitely the most rewarding.”

Ain’t it crazy 
All the time that you spend 
Drivin’ through the rainbow for the pot at the end 
I got some rust on my Chevy but it’s ready to roll 
I got a rhinestone sky and a song in my soul 
It ain’t a smooth ride life it’s a winding road 
Yeah, it might be gravel, but it feels like gold 

In “Walkin’ Each Other Home” Bentley sings, broke is where you found me, and you turned me right to gold. When asked about the significance of the word “gold,” Bentley admits he’s “not a gold guy.”  

“I wear an Ironman Timex watch,” he says, raising his arm up to the Zoom camera to show his hardware. “I don’t have flashy stuff and it’s my least favorite color, but it somehow wound up in a lot of the song titles. 

“Aspen in the fall is so beautiful. This whole town turns gold. It’s a color that worked its way into my life, into my imagination in some way. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s made its way into a lot of my songs but I’m not sure where it came from. Wasn’t intentional. … That color represents a certain place physically and mentally for me of happiness.”

For Bentley, taking the year off and living in Colorado was cathartic. He says being in nature and spending time alone allows him to recharge. In turn, it also helps influence many of the songs on Gravel & Gold

“I really do recharge by being alone,” he says. “I’m not a hugely social person outside of the gig. You know, my wife and I laugh about how we’re not anti-social, just given the choice I’d rather be home unless there’s something really fun going on.”

This sentiment can be heard on “Something Real,” one of the most honest tracks on the album. Bentley wrote the deeply personal song on his Colorado writing retreat with Dick, Gorley, HARDY, and Copperman.

Sometimes a crowd makes me lonely
Sometimes a shot just makes me sad
Sometimes I miss that old small-town, slowdown life I kinda wish that I still had

I can’t really pour my heart out on the FM radio 
Cause the way I’m really feeling 
Won’t fill up the coliseum on the edge of Tupelo

“HARDY helped rough out some of the edges of the initial idea, and I love the honesty of the song,” he says. “Writing songs and making an album, you can only do what really speaks to you. If you try to write a song [that’s] going to be universal, that just doesn’t work, at least for me. It’s always been those personal songs, like ‘I Hold On,’ that are meaningful to me personally and end up somehow connecting on a larger scale. So, this is a pretty extreme example of that, but I think people can relate to it.”

Bentley co-wrote 10 of the album’s 14 tracks and says some of his favorite songs on the record are the ones he didn’t write. He praises the Nashville songwriting community and admits, “You can’t write them all.” 

“I’m really grateful to not only get a chance to write with legendary songwriters but also the songs that I cut that I did not write,” he says. “I feel like I’m always a student of songwriting. Never stop being a student I think is the key to songwriting.”

He likens getting in the room with writers he admires as “songwriting fantasy camp” and says he’s often “just trying to keep up because they’re so good.”

“I’ve been doing it for a long time,” he says of songwriting. “I feel like I’ve gotten better at writing about where I am. It gets harder the longer you do this because you can’t write about the themes necessarily that you did when you were 20 years old. It’s just not authentic to be writing about girls and trucks.”

The singer recalls advice he received from a veteran songwriter shortly after moving to town. The writer said Bentley needed to write 500 songs and put them in a drawer and never look at them again. 

“That really taught me not to be so precious with songs and just write every day,” he says. “I remember Tom Douglas told me that Harlan Howard had told him to use a pen, not a pencil. ‘Have some confidence, believe in what you’re writing, and put it on paper. Don’t be ashamed about it; don’t second guess. Put it out there with some confidence.’”

Bentley says he’s learned the most from Tony Martin, whom he’s witnessed write songs on Post-it Notes, and throw them into a drawer once done before writing the next one. Mark Nesler also urged him to write with his contemporaries. While it’s important to write with A-list songwriters, soon the next big songwriters in town will be those he’s coming up with, Nesler advised.  

Bentley, who signed his first publishing deal in 2001, says songwriting remains just as important today as it was when he moved to town nearly 30 years ago.

“Songs are everything,” he asserts. “They still are. I think the great thing about country music is that the production keeps changing but if you ain’t got the songs, you ain’t got shit, and it doesn’t matter what the production is. You can’t hide a bad song.”

As Bentley enters a new chapter as a songwriter and artist with Gravel & Gold, he remains a student of the craft of songwriting. 

“Looking at my career, I’ve been doing it for a long time but I’m not ready to leave,” he says. “You’re gonna have to kick me out of the way to get my slot, but when it stops being fun, I’ll stop doing it.

“It’s such a gift it all worked out. … Sometimes country music is great, like being the antidote for whatever you’re going through. But now I want to say something, and I want songs that say something real, and I feel like these 14 songs do. There are songs and sounds that people can dig into and the deeper they go, the more authentic it’ll hopefully feel to them.”

Photo Credit by Robby Klein / The Greenroom PR

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