Making a ‘slow climb’ to the big time
Graduating from clubs to arenas, country star has kept his working-musician mindset
Ever since country star Dierks Bentley graduated to arenas and stadiums, he has performed a preshow ritual. It involves finding what he perceives to be “the worst seat in the building” and sitting in it.
“I sit there and think, ‘OK, how can I sing to this person who will be sitting right here? How can I make them feel the music? Feel the lyrics?’ ” says Bentley, who brings his What the Hell tour to Rogers Arena on Feb. 9. “I’m very conscious about every seat in the house. I’ve been doing this for awhile, but just started headlining the arenas and amphitheatres three years ago. It’s a slow climb and now we’re finally here. For me and the guys in the band, it feels really new even though we’ve been doing it for a long time.”
It’s all part of that working-musician mindset, something he appears to have maintained over the years.
Bentley has multiple platinum records and 12 Grammy nominations and has been a member of the Grand Ole Opry for more than a decade. But his early years toiling in tiny clubs or developing his bluegrass chops at the Station Inn on the outskirts of Nashville are never far from his mind.
“You take all the years’ experiences of playing, going back to the very beginning to the days playing for tips or playing for free beer, even before I played for tips,” he says.
“You take those experiences in the small places and how you connected to them and try to use the same experiences to connect to people in these arenas. I look how I started out, having to get drunk people’s attention and how to connect to people physically or through the music. I do the same thing now, whether it be high-fiving somebody or diving out into the crowd or just breaking down the wall with the words to my songs.”
With success comes freedom, but it’s not as if Bentley has ever cowtowed to Nashville’s top brass. In 2010, for instance, he returned to his roots and released the critically acclaimed, stripped-down bluegrass record Up on the Ridge, ignoring the naysayers’ advice that temporarily abandoning mainstream country would kill the momentum of his career. Still, his increased profile in Music City may have played a role in Bentley flexing his independence even further with his eighth studio record, Black.
In the hits-obsessed world of country music, releasing an introspective concept album about the ups and downs of marriage may not seem like the move of a careerist. But now that Black has been out for eight months, it’s obvious that Bentley’s instincts were bang on. The song Different for Girls, a duet with Elle King, is up for a best country/group performance Grammy and the record quickly became the highest-charting album of his career when it was released back in May.
He is now crossing Canada on an arena tour and he says fans are starting to respond to darker material for the new record with the same enthusiasm as his party numbers such as Drunk on a Plane.
Of course, releasing an introspective record about marital strife just as your celebrity is soaring is not without peril.
The assumption from fans may be that the songs are 100 per cent autobiographical. There are certainly some dark moments on Black, including the sultry I’ll Be the Moon, which is about infidelity. The first single, Somewhere on the Beach, is a singalong ode to moving on after a breakup. The fact that Black is also the maiden name of Bentley’s wife, Cassidy, also seems to reinforce the notion that these songs spring directly from the couple’s real-life highs and lows.
But, for the record, the pair remain happily married. Cassidy even shows up in the new, Iceland-shot video for the album’s title track.
“The songs I didn’t write are probably some of the darker songs on there,” he says.
“If songs like I’ll Be the Moon be taken to be autobiographical, that’s OK. I think the one way you make it more personal is when you start including songs you didn’t write that can be confused with something you did write. This is beyond what is happening in my life. It’s taking the story of my relationship with my wife and expanding on it to stuff I’ve seen in other relationships around me and what this business can do to marriage. So, it’s OK, I hope fans just enjoy the ride. I think songs one through 13 take you on a bit of a journey through the ups and downs of love.”