Dierks Bentley Releases 'The Mountain'

Dierks Bentley's latest album, The Mountain, came out on Friday, June 8. The title for the 13-track record was inspired by a vacation and his family he took with his producer, Ross Copperman.

"I was up in Wyoming with some friends, and we were just hanging out on the back deck and we were watching the sun go down over the Teton Mountains," Bentley recalls. "It was beautiful, and I was with my producer, Ross Copperman, and our wives and kids, just all in a cabin up there. I'm not sure whose idea it was, but my wife actually said on the trip out there, she said, 'I feel like the idea for the album is going to come out on this trip.' She really said it. Maybe it was Ross. 'A mountain. We're looking at a mountain.'

"It just really clicked," he continues. "It's not the most clever title in the whole world. I'm sure it's been used before, but it really was just like The Mountain. I loved the metaphor, but where we spent a lot of the summer was out there and where I'm from – I had a mountain in my backyard. I started climbing when I was four – Camelback Mountain – that I could walk to from my house. So, it's always been a big part of my life, and it kind of resonated with my desire to something that reflected the West and that world that I loved so much."

Bentley later went on a writing retreat to Colorado with some of his friends, unaware that it would ultimately be the place where he would both write and record the project.

"When I got to Colorado – it would've only been about three weeks later – that title's one of the titles I had," says Bentley. "And Jon Randall Stewart and Luke Dick and Natalie Hemby started working on this song called 'The Mountain,' and I jumped in on it and I just loved it."

For the Arizona native, mountains have always been a source of inspiration for him.

"I've always been surrounded by them," Bentley reveals. "Growing up there's always been one in my view. It's an analogy I've never really made before, but it just really connected this time in my life for some reason. It's funny before in my career, I kind of stalled out there in the mid-2000s, and I always thought if I wrote a book of my life it would've been a picture or a sketch of a mountain on the cover and it would've said A View From Almost the Top. And there'd be a picture of me like climbing this mountain and someone's parachuting in, and someone crawling over my back over here – it's like all of us trying to get to the top of this country music mountain.

"Fortunately," adds the singer, "if I wrote that book, I'd now have to write a whole back section 'cause things have been really great the last five years."

Bentley is currently on his Mountain High Tour with Brothers Osborne and LANCO. Find dates at dierks.com.

Photo Credit: Instagram/dierksbentley