Dierks Bentley Has a Fighter’s Spirit in ‘The Mountain’ [Listen]
Dierks Bentley is journeying his way upward on the full length version of "The Mountain," the title track of his upcoming 2018 album.
The song gives fans a sense of what type of vibe Bentley was striving while nestled in the mountains of Colorado to create the album. "The Mountain" is a rugged sound with deep guitar and drums that carry you through, placed alongside a soft fiddle.
In a speech at Country Radio Seminar in early 2018, Bentley compared his journey through the music industry like that of climbing a mountain, and it seems that voyage is symbolically described here. The singer makes his way up a never-ending rock, climbing "like hell through the brush and the bramble" to get to the top.
"Well you better know the bottom if you want to be a climber / Cause there's always another one a little bit higher / Just when I think I'm finally done / I'm staring at another one / So I reach down deep and I lace them up tighter," he sings, persevering in the second verse.
Bentley called upon several of Nashville's top songwriters including Ross Copperman, Ashley Gorley, Natalie Hemby to join him for a writers retreat in Telluride, Colo., to write and record, and he used the surrounding landscape as inspiration for the new project. But the song draws in deeper meaning, with the mountain not just serving as a metaphor for his career, but life in general.
“Obviously, the songs were written and recorded in the mountains. But it's the mountain that we’re all faced with every day, and the struggle to put one foot in front of the other even when things are hard, that we all have in common," he says. "Looking back now, I think we were all searching for hope and optimism when we were writing this music.”
The Mountain is available on June 8.
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