Bentley climbs higher for ‘The Mountain’
Country star’s new album inspired by the natural beauty of Telluride
Dierks Bentley’s flip phone rings beside his leg on the couch. He picks it up and looks at the small rectangular screen on the outside cover. ❚ It’s early May, and Bentley’s Mountain High tour hasn’t launched yet. He’s still in the early stages of promoting his new album, The Mountain. The relative calm of his day means the basic flip phone — his communication device of choice — will suffice.
“The flip phone, for me, is recognizing a window of time I have in my life right now with none of my kids being on a phone,” he says. The smartphone “is pumping my brain full of digital data that I don’t need. Creativity and time and presence all get sucked out by it.”
Bentley describes himself as a seeker. And as he was preparing to launch his tour and then his album, he was seeking time with his family and presence in every moment. His search for creativity and inspiration started at the end of August with a writing retreat to Colorado. It was so successful, he returned there to record The Mountain in November.
Available now, The Mountain is a 13-song collection inspired by the nat-
ural beauty of Telluride. Free of distractions, Bentley was able to maximize each moment of the creative process.
“It was just magic,” Bentley says, explaining that the trip produced mature songs about life instead of the echoes of young love so heavily featured on his early albums. “I have kids that are literally growing in front of me. I’m fascinated by life, and I’m wanting to make the most of it. That involves being present in the moment you’re in, which is back to what this album is about — being grateful for life and wanting to make the most of it.”
Universal Music Group Nashville President Cindy Mabe says Bentley’s music has always reflected his life and
connection to the world around him. With The Mountain, Mabe says, Bentley returned to his roots for inspiration.
“At a time when the world can’t seem to disconnect, he finds a way to get back to what’s important,” Mabe says. “The songs follow that path, and the traditional instrumentation and bluegrass inspiration, help carry a theme throughout this album.”
Bentley’s longtime manager, Mary Hilliard Harrington, agrees. Like he did with his critically acclaimed bluegrass album Up On the Ridge, she says, Bentley is making music and business decisions based on his heart.
“This is what makes him feel good and feels right,” Harrington says. “It’s a luxury to finally be at a point in your career when you can just do what you want to do, and hopefully that’s some of the intangible things you hear in this music.”
Amid tour launch preparations, Bentley had to swap out his flip phone for his more versatile iPhone. The first week of the tour, he met his band and crew at Second Harvest Food Bank to do some volunteer work — reflecting the spirit of the album and setting the tone for the tour.
“Pull your weight,” Bentley jokingly shouted across the room as his band, crew and members of opening act LANCO hurriedly worked to meet their goal of packing 10,000 pounds of food.
By the end of the morning, the team — Bentley included — had packed 10,426 pounds of food, good for 8,688 meals.
“I get a little light shined on me right here before the album comes out,” the singer says. “I thought, ‘ How can I reflect that on our fans, that they are going through hard times and showing their perseverance, or onto places that are meaningful and make a difference?’ ”
While the singer is on tour, he meets fans at his shows. Often they want to tell him about their lives, anecdotes he’s sure are threaded into the fabric of his new songs. But The Mountain didn’t originate from fans’ stories — it started with his own.
Bentley, an Arizona native, wanted to make an album inspired by the West. He wasn’t sure if that involved music or lyrics or how it fit together. Knowing how much he loves Telluride, Bentley’s wife, Cassidy, suggested he return to the small mountain town to write for his album. The suggestion meant another week away from home, and Bentley balked.
He thought about it, and as more people got involved, appointments started to get booked. They assembled a team of some of the best writers in Nashville — Luke Dick, Natalie Hemby, Ashley Gorley, Jon Nite and two of Bentley’s three producers on the album, Ross Copperman and Jon Randall. Bentley called it a “fantasy songwriting camp.” Knowing if he stayed in Nashville he’d be distracted by their children, Cassidy persuaded the singer to go.
“Forced exile helps me stay focused,” Bentley says. “Knowing if I put maximum time in on these six days, it’s the equivalent of two months in Nashville. I got out there and it was so freeing. I felt like I was 20 years old living in a ski town.”
In the mornings, Bentley woke early and took a gondola to the top of a mountain to watch the sunrise. At night, he and the writers sat on the front porch and looked at the mountains. During the day, he says, they “cranked out songs.”
“This album had a theme, and we felt like we were living out that theme,” says Gorley, who co-wrote three songs on The Mountain.
The songwriters split into groups in different cabins, and Bentley would float among them. He recalls finishing a song with Hemby and Dick, then rotating to another cabin so thinly furnished that Copperman set up a studio out of boxes and had to use a trash can as a console for his computer.
“It was a first-time kind of feeling, which I’m always chasing in this business — how do I get back to doing something new?” Bentley says. “I feel like I owe it to myself, I owe it to my fans, to make a record that is an attempt to go for something, even if it’s terrible.”
Bentley had Living, which was inspired by his life — and how he wasn’t living each day to the fullest — when he was on the road. He finished that song with Copperman, Nite and Gorley.
Then seven more over the course of a week.
“He was writing with the collective conscious of what the country needed,” Harrington says. “This feeling of ‘There is a lot of heavy stuff out there.’ Can we focus on being in the moment, being grateful? He talks to fans, and when he wrote this album, he had just come off of doing a bunch of stuff in Vegas. It can’t not affect you.”
Nothing on but the Stars, a song about one last night together, “felt amazing in that environment,” Bentley says. The vibe of the song The Mountain excited him, and he says he discovered that Travelin’ Light, which he wrote with Nite and Gorley, was an unpolished gem upon his return to Nashville. On the album, Travelin’ Light features Brandi Carlile.
“Dierks has that vision,” says Gorley, who has written 37 No. 1 hits. “Almost no artists have that entire album vision anymore. It used to be an amazing thing that people did, but now it’s just, ‘Where’s the next hit?’ Dierks zoomed out.”
“I feel like I owe it to myself, I owe it to my fans, to make a record that is an attempt to go for something, even if it’s terrible.”