Dierks Bentley Ups Ante On Creativity On New Telluride-Inspired Project

Dierks Bentley traveled to the mountains for the Telluride Bluegrass Festival last summer to perform, and came out with the inspiration for his ninth and latest album, The Mountain, due out in early 2018 on Capitol Nashville. 

Returning to Telluride not long after for a writers retreat with fellow writers Natalie Hemby, Luke Dick, Ross Copperman, Jon Randall, Jon Nite and Ashley Gorley, Bentley knocked out the bulk of the material that would make up the new album that week. He calls it the most inspiring creative experience he’s ever had.

“Telluride just makes you want to reach for your guitar,” described Bentley. “We all went out there and got completely off the grid…out of our normal element and the grind that happens on Music Row and it was, from the very get-go, magic. We’d wake up every morning, grab a coffee, take the gondola up, watch the sun come up over the mountains, and by 8:30 we were writing. We just wrote non-stop. 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. Looking back now, I think we were all searching for hope and optimism when we were writing this music.”

Two months later, Bentley traveled back to Telluride with producers Ross Copperman, Jon Randall, and executive producer Arturo Buenahora Jr., along with an array of musicians to record the songs in a small studio atop a mesa outside of town.