Dierks Bentley – Are you ready for the country?
“Ten bucks an hour to watch videos of Faron Young and George Jones, and see how they entertained crowds and sang!” he marvels. “I was doing research for the documentary A Century Of Country. I made money and it also fed the disease. As a P.A. holding lights up, and getting coffee, I got to be around Chet Atkins, and then Eddy Arnold. And I’d pick people up at the airport who were coming in to be interviewed; Charlie Daniels was one.”
It was the height of the post-Garth Brooks explosion “hat act” era, and if some of Brooks’ showmanship appealed, most of what was going on struck the young wannabe as both sappy pop and not something he was in any way built to be part of. He was still trying to write songs and play guitar better, but he’d about given up on being a country music performer in that climate.
In the meantime, on Tuesday nights he’d be at the world home base of bluegrass, the Station Inn, catching the practiced musicians who play as “The Sidemen” attacking grass, of course, but also Merle Haggard and traditional country. He’d had, he admits, some preconceptions that bluegrass was “old people’s music,” but what he found was passion, energy, and commitment without pretense.
Guys his own age hanging out there — particularly fiddler Jason Carter, bass player and fellow Arizonian Mike Bub, and mando ace Ronnie McCoury of the Del McCoury Band — took him in, handing him tapes that show how a “G Run” works. The taught him harmonies, but he was most taken with their relation to each other and Del, and with their willingness to reach out to the likes of a Steve Earle.
On Wednesday nights, Bentley was catching a different “real band” around town: the hard roots-rock outfit of John Hartford’s son Jamie, which then, as now, was out there in the Nashville trenches playing with energy and singing with soul. Jamie’s working-guy love ballad “Good Things Happen When You’re Around” is Bentley’s personal favorite on his new album; Alison Krauss sings harmony on the chorus.
Pickers from the bluegrass and rock haunts joined him for gigs around Nashville, and they appeared on his little-heard 1999 indie release Don’t Leave Me In Love. The disc shows a bluegrass/honky-tonk/rock blend in the making, with more of an outright bluegrass tinge than would be the case later; the vocals sometimes show the recognizable influence of Lester Flatt’s amiable lilt. A couple self-penned songs that later appeared on his Capitol debut (“Bartenders, Barstools, Barmaids” and “Whisky Tears”) first showed up there.
Next came a publishing deal with Sony Tree, which meant he could now work on his music exclusively. Executive Arthur Buenahora teamed him with another young songwriter, Brett Beavers, who was, not insignificantly, a working bass player. Today, Beavers is not only Bentley’s regular writing partner and a songwriting presence on his own, he’s also the leader of Lee Ann Womack’s touring band.
Bentley and Beavers have become the sort of writing team that can finish each other’s sentences, and songs. Their close working relationship is the reason Bentley’s songs on Modern Day Drifter can be collaborations, and still be personal.
“I called Brett one day when I was in a real bad spot, after a breakup with a girlfriend,” Bentley recalls, “and said, ‘Man, I just wish my heart would break; this needs to be done with.’ So one of my favorite songs on the first Capitol record, and the first one we wrote, was ‘Wish It Would Break’. Phrases sometimes just come to you. I just said, one time more recently, ‘My favorite kind of beer is domestic, light and cold’ — and Brett started doing work on that!” (Their song by that name is a hooky comic change-up on Modern Day Drifter.)
Capitol saw the team as one to take a chance on, signing Bentley — with Beavers as producer — for that first major-label outing with all the hits (and more country sounds than the single hits alone show). They found a level of label support for the themes, sound synthesis and self-penned approach that surprised even them.
“You know how you hear people say, I finally got the record I wanted to make — after ten years? Well, I got to do that on the first record,” he says. “It was going to be an album especially for guys like me, who liked Waylon, liked Buck, liked Ray Price — and liked to drink beer and weren’t afraid of that!”
Music Row virtually always likes to see a variety of songwriters get tracks on a major release, and Nashville songwriters clamor to get on those releases (even more so today, given the shrinking number of major labels). When the inevitable question about all those original songs arose at Capitol, the answer was again positive: “Larry Willoughby of A&R there just answered, ‘He writes his own stuff, like Hank Williams did — just trust them, working together.'”
It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine, nor would it be unprecedented, more effort to control what Bentley put on the second record, in pursuit of topping the first. But instead he’s found that he and Beavers are simply trusted to do it again.