Dierks Bentley Talks New Album ‘Broken Branches,’ Star-Studded Collaborations, Avoiding Social Media And More

Dierks Bentley is celebrating the outliers and misfits of small-town life and of country music with the release of his 11th studio album entitled, Broken Branches, out tomorrow Friday (June 13) via Capitol Records Nashville.

Dierks Bentley Talks His New 11-Track Album, Broken Branches

Featuring 11 tracks, this fresh debut follows 2023’s Gravel & Gold and centers itself around the title track, written by Zach Abend, Beau Bailey and Graham Barham. Serving as one of the highlighted collaborations on the album, “Broken Branches” features guest vocals by Country Music Hall of Famer John Anderson and hit singer/songwriter Riley Green and includes lyrics that sum up the theme of the record, tapping into the stories of the dreamers who find their way to Nashville.

“I mean, my idea of that song when I heard it, is just about how everyone in this town is a little bit of a broken branch off the family tree,” Bentley explained the meaning behind the track in a recent press conference with Music Mayhem and other media. “Everyone that’s come to this town is doing something probably a little bit different than their family has done before. They’ve come in here to chase this kind of crazy honky tonk country dream and kind of being a black sheep in the family and being here and doing something a little different and just all that comes with that, the highs and the lows, faith and brokenness and redemption and small town life and just, I don’t know, that kind of felt like the place to start from.”

“I love making country records,” he added. “I love living in Nashville and just all that’s happening in music right now [and] I find it so exciting and fun to just have a great view of all the new guys coming up and the other guys that are kind of having second, third careers. It is a great time in country music.”

Of getting his artist friends on the album, Bentley said, “John Anderson is the original black sheep of the family. So to have him on that track and then to have Riley Green kind of all three generations of broken branches, that was my idea in the collaboration on that.”

Tracking down Anderson for the song wasn’t too difficult despite his legendary status as Bentley noted, “I got in touch with him and it’s just like he’s just so down to earth, so easy to connect with. There’s no frills or anything like that. But he’s funny. He still drives himself in his RV to gigs, and he spent three days in Valdosta, Georgia with a broken down RV, staying in a motel, waiting for the RV to get fixed. He got back to Nashville. I’m like, ‘This is a Country Music Hall of Fame member in a motel, waiting for his RV to get fixed.’ I just love John Anderson so much. He’s the real deal and really special to have him on that track.”

“Cold Beer Can” Featuring Stephen Wilson Jr.

Miranda Lambert and Stephen Wilson Jr. also collaborate with Bentley on Broken Branches, with the latter of the two serving as a co-writer on multiple tracks, including “Cold Beer Can” and “Something Worth Fixing.”  Wilson Jr. plays guitar and lends his vocals on the second verse of “Cold Beer Can,” an early release about how a cold one can bring people together through drinking during conversation or serving up a 12-pack as a peace offering.

“A cold beer can go further than a dollar / 12-pack peace pipe for the blue collar / Worth more than a silver when it changes hands / Money can’t buy what a cold beer can,” the two artists sing throughout the chorus of the track.

Co-Wrote “Something Worth Fixing” With Stephen Wilson Jr.

“Something Worth Fixing” which Bentley co-wrote with Wilson Jr. and frequent collaborator Luke Dick reminded him of the time HARDY earned a credit for his hit “Beers On Me.”

“I feel like I’m lucky to do some of this writing, and get a bunch of people together and bring in someone brand new, just before they’ve totally blown up,” Bentley said, referencing working with Wilson Jr.

Bentley continued, “A couple records ago, having HARDY in the room was really fun. He tapped into something, that source that everyone’s trying to tap into in this town. He was really dialed in on it. And writing with Steven Wilson Jr., I was a huge fan before anything was starting to happen. Having him in the room with guys like John Randall, Luke Dick, Ross Copperman, Ashley, and Chase McGill, was really fun. And this is one of the songs that came out. The track has his unique guitar playing all over it. I feel like, when he’s involved with writing something, that subject’s done, [you] can’t really write it again [because] he’s written it more creatively than the next guy or girl going to try to write it. He’s just such a deep kind of weird dude and he’s just so needed in Nashville right now.”

“Never You” Featuring Miranda Lambert

Dierks Bentley and Miranda Lambert join forces on “Never You” — a song that plays out like a powerful ode to the Arizona native’s wife, Cassidy Black, of 20 years. Bentley didn’t write the track, penned by Scooter Carusoe, Ross Copperman and Ben Williams, but he was drawn to it after hearing his voice on the tune, thanks in part to the new technical advances of AI. 

Of working with Lambert, he said, “We’ve been such good friends for so long, but we’ve never had a true collaboration together. And so I was like, I’m going to make it happen on this one. I sent it to her and had to change [the lyrics] from long black hair to blonde hair to make it work with Miranda.”

“Never You” finds Bentley and Lambert acknowledging the things that come and go, but share gratitude for knowing there’s a constant love in their life. “Still the feel the same in these arms / Still find my lips in the dark / It’s still your long blond hair falling off of your shoulder / It’s never you / That I’m not thinking about / That I don’t thank God that I found / If there’s anything in my life I’d ever do over, it’s never you,” the chorus goes.

“I mean, I think one thing I’ve always admired about the younger guys and girls in country music is they put the relationships front and center. I mean, they’re all over social media together and it’s very open,” Bentley shared of how the younger generation of stars take their relationships online. “…I mean, I’ve been very open with my relationship with my wife for a long time. She’s not on social media. She doesn’t do any of that stuff, so maybe not as public as other relationships are out there. But I’ve known her since eighth grade and it’s always been her since then, since I met her, even when we weren’t together in that period between eighth grade and her coming out to a concert where I opened up for George Strait in 2005. She’s always been that one constant for sure, ever since then.”

Enlisted Some Of Nashville’s Most Esteemed Songwriters

Collaborations aside, the songwriters on Broken Branches are another major highlight of the album. During the process of picking the songs for the record, Bentley enlisted a handful of unknown songwriters from around the Nashville community, not necessarily by choice, but because their songs grabbed his ears the most.

Bentley drove around the backroads of his Tennessee home listening to the rough demos without knowing who the writer was. He credits Executive Producer Mary Hilliard Harrington for leading him to the tracks that he otherwise wouldn’t have heard. For example, “Standing In The Sun” — a love song, written by Kyle Sturrock, which offers visually pleasing lyrics that compare the feeling of being with a romantic partner to being in the warmth of the sunrise. 

“I will say one thing that’s really cool about this record is having Mary involved from the beginning. She really did a lot of work to go find the songs. And as she knows, I didn’t want to know who wrote the songs. If it were an Ashley Gorley song, I might’ve been biased to think, oh, it’s a great song,” Bentley explained his process behind choosing the tracks for the record. “I just didn’t want to know who wrote the songs, just send ’em to me without the names on. Let’s just listen and pick the best songs…. She’s my face in some ways to the industry, and so she went through so many great songs to help me find the ones that could kind of help piece out the rest of the record.”

“I think, in some way, we try to find those songs that are the broken branches, not the mainstream ones. We’re always looking for something a little left of center, a little different. I feel like ‘Jesus Loves Me,’ is kind of a quirky song in some ways. ‘Standing in the Sun,’ that song was written by a new guy in town. He wrote it by himself…. I love how these songs got sent to me, I don’t know who wrote them, I don’t want to know who the writers are. I just want to just be out there fishing, trying to see what I pull up out of the water and hopefully find a big one that’s different.”

“Off The Map”

“Off The Map,” written by Jeremy Bussey, Lauren McLamb, and Adam Wood, is another track that Bentley recalls hearing while driving through the backroads of the Volunteer State. The tune fit his vision of coming across lyrical messages with “deep meanings and distinctive quirks, centered on the imperfect perfections of community spirit.” 

“I was off the map. I was driving out to Hickman County away from town for a little bit. And that song came on and hit me so hard,” Bentley recalled. “I don’t know why it did. I think living in Nashville and it’s so busy and it’s just so counter to how I feel like I’m supposed to be living sometimes. The mayhem of being here just struck a chord with being off the map. What I love about the song though is it’s not just like a figure, literally like you got to go somewhere to be off the map, your couch can be off the map. You can be on a bar stool and be off the map. You can be a beach chair, can kind of be anywhere when you’re taking that time just to tune the world out. It doesn’t mean you’re lost. It just means you’re taking a little break from being on this grid that we’re all on.”

“So it really struck me,” he added. “I hope it’s a single. I always think about these songs we get sent. I’m lucky enough to get some of the writers’ best songs. And I feel very lucky to get ’em and also really scared to mess ’em up in the studio. It’s easier when they come in as a demo and you can kind of play off that and you feel like you’re honoring what the songwriter kind of had in mind for the song. But when they send you just a guitar vocal, the guy just presses play on a record, plays on a shoebox tape recorder and sends it over, it’s like, oh my gosh. It’s up to us to see this thing not take this guy’s one great song of the year maybe and do something awesome with it. So there’s a lot of pressure when you take someone’s song in the studio and try to give the right treatment. And this one took three different times to play on it. I finally brought my guitar player in and he played the acoustic part on it.”

Sampled Puddle Of Mudd’s “She F**king Hates Me” On “She Hates Me”

Although Broken Branches isn’t officially out for one more day, Bentley has already seen success with the project, with the album’s third track, “She Hates Me,” written alongside Ashley Gorley, Chase McGill, Ross Copperman, Jimmy Allen, and Wesley Scantlin. The song, which was released on Valentine’s Day as a preview track, marked the biggest radio debut of his career. But, Bentley didn’t anticipate such a success and almost didn’t record the track for the album.  

“Even the first song that came out, ‘What Was I Thinking,’ I fought so hard for that not to be the first single,” Bentley said, looking back at how he’s always struggled to predict the success of his releases. “I wanted this other song that was more serious, what I consider to be a real country song, to be the first single. I just love that kind of music. Thank God ‘What Was I Thinking’ was a single. And ‘She Hates Me’ and ‘Drunk on a Plane,’ I almost didn’t even put that on the record. Then I took the signature lick off of that track. I thought that it was kind of a too quirky kind of sound. It’s just like I just have head games and luckily I surround myself with people that can see a bigger picture. But I knew I loved, ‘She Hates Me.’ I mean the guys that wrote that song, there’s not a bad line in there, it’s so well written and it is fun…..And it’s really fun to have those in the live show. I mean, so it just kind of checked all the boxes. And I also thought with Country Radio you’d really want to come out with something that hopefully gets the ball rolling kind of quickly so you can get to more songs off the record.”

Hates Making TikTok Videos And Doing Social Media

With 22 No. 1 singles under his belt, 15 Grammy nominations, and having earned several awards and accolades throughout his 20 plus year career, these days, Bentley is in a space where he isn’t chasing anything. For him, it’s not about social media or numbers or trying to be someone he’s not. 

He says, “I hate doing TikTok videos, TikTak as I call it, just to annoy people. I don’t want to be involved in that stuff. I gotta flip phone. I’m trying to avoid all the — I just want to live my life, man. I want to play live music and hang out with my band and play shows and see people in person and just have conversations and just try to find real life in life somewhere so I’m not really holding on too tightly.”

That wasn’t always the case though. Bentley recalls a time when he wasn’t able to sit in his career and enjoy the artists coming up and the ones who came before him. 

“When I made my bluegrass record, I felt like I was just so lost and I felt like I tried. I opened for Kenny Chesney twice and I went out there and tried to do my own headlining thing and I spent a year and a half getting my butt kicked, playing arenas, but playing half houses and even then it wasn’t full. Then I went back to open for Brad Paisley and I was just like, okay, I need to step off the whole merry-go-round. Just make a record that really is meaningful and just be creative and not worry about the touring side of it for a while,” he said, looking back to his earlier days. “So at that time I was not really comfortable with where I was, but where I am now, I mean, I’m really comfortable just doing the best I can do and definitely not chasing any themes.”

“I feel like all the songs that hopefully create that broken branch come together to create its own new little tree. And if listeners will get that, I don’t know. But for me it’s important that we try with any endeavor to give it all we have and be able to walk away going. We really put a lot of time working into that and that was the goal. And we feel like we got it and either it’ll work or it won’t, but it’s a success regardless,” he added of Broken Branches.

Broken Branches Tour

In addition to his album dropping, Bentley has been busy on the road. On May 29, he launched his BROKEN BRANCHES TOUR, named after his upcoming project. The trek includes openers Zach Top and The Band Loula, and takes Bentley across the country, visiting more than 30 cities.

“Going out with guys like Zach Top and Riley Green in the past, I learned that there’s a whole higher pitch of screaming within my crowd that I normally don’t hear until they come out on stage like, oh, there are some real young people out there. Zach is, I’ve been saying for a year now, Zach’s the future of country music. He really is. He’ll be as big as Morgan Wallen in a country kind of way, that traditional country, thing’s hot right now and no one’s doing it. Nobody’s done it like Zach. I mean, his voice is incredible,” Bentley said.

Bentley added, “So if you love country music, you just hear it in his voice. He just does that thing well, great guitar player, funny, good looking guy. I mean, he’s like George Strait, but I don’t know, I just think he’s the future and the future’s in good hands for sure…. We also have The Band Loula out there, a new band, this guy and this girl who are making a great swampy kind of bluegrassy acoustic country. And that’s always fun turning fans on to new music.”

Dierks Bentley BROKEN BRANCHES Track List