Dierks Bentley might live a pretty straight life right now, but that wasn’t always the case. The 42-year-old fondly recalls breaking the law on Halloween as a child, when he celebrated with explosives instead of candy.
“When I was a kid, I was all into fireworks,” Bentley shared. “Growing up in Arizona, we couldn’t get them, so we’d have them shipped in illegally. I still remember the name of the guy we’d call. His name was Joe, and he’d bring in, ship them in a package with no writing on them. We were all about M-80s in the mailboxes and bottle rocket wars. To me, as a kid, Halloween was fireworks, was blowing up stuff around home.”
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Bentley will likely keep his Halloween with his three children on the legal side this year, but he probably won’t buy them expensive candy or costumes. The singer-songwriter refuses to raise spoiled children, which is why he keeps their childhood as normal as possible.
“We constantly think about ways to give our kids as much of a balance as possible,” Bentley told CMT. “One of our favorite things to do is just go to Second Harvest, which is a food bank in Nashville, and pack backpacks for kids. They learn about the fact that these kids get their food from school. That’s the only place they really eat.”
“It really helps them understand the privileges they have,” he added, “and hopefully plants a little bit of a seed in them for having that compassion and interest in helping folks in their community.”
Bentley’s latest single, “Burning Man,” is a collaboration with his former tour mates, Brothers Osborne, who served as the opening act on Bentley’s just-wrapped Mountain High Tour. The duo also appeared in the inspirational video with Bentley.
“This song is a personal reflection and it was important to me that you feel that with the video,” Bentley said. “The Bros and I flew out to the desert in July to shoot this … Several people on the crew had heat strokes, two cars got stuck in the sand and we had to have a rattlesnake wrangler with us at all times – but we got the shots!”
Bentley has just been announced as the producer for a new single-camera comedy, set at a Music City bar where “where singers and songwriters go to chase their dreams, or maybe just to fall in love if only for a night.” Details, including a film schedule or air date, have yet to be announced.
Photo Credit: Getty images/Erika Goldring
