Dierks Bentley‘s tenth studio album, Gravel & Gold, is out. Bentley recorded — and scrapped — two other albums, before creating what became the 14-track project that is out now. Held to a standard created entirely by his own hands, the Grand Ole Opry member refused to put out anything that didn’t sound authentically him.

“It wasn’t until I was in the studio for the second time, I started thinking about ten,” Bentley shared with Everything Nash and other outlets during a virtual media event. “And that’s where I started thinking more about the tenth album should be not a greatest hits album, but a greatest styles and sounds of my previous albums all on one record. So it’s an album that collected the little areas I tried to carve my little thing out of. Obviously, at country radio are the hits people know for me on the radio — whatever that style is — trying to do something new or different. But then also,my love of bluegrass and ’90s country and the fun songs on this record.”

Gravel & Gold includes the comedic “Beer At My Funeral,” along with bluegrass songs, traditional-sounding country songs, and songs that are unique to Bentley’s sound, even if they blur genre lines.

“I didn’t mean to do that, but my first album had some stuff that was different but also had some shuffles,” Bentley reflects. “It had on it a bluegrass song by Del McCoury, and this one ends with a Billy Strings bluegrass song. And so, it’s really a compilation of how I want to make an album. My tenth would be something like, this is me doing what I do, all the little things that I love about country music on one album. It’s not a greatest hits with a collection of my sound and my styles. Hopefully I’ve done the greatest I’ve done before. So that’s why the tenth ended up becoming a little bit of a theme for me as far as trying to make it a collection of all those styles and sounds.”

Bentley’s music and his art — and even his inner self — were transformed by his move out to Colorado during the pandemic, and then back to Music City, The Arizona native, by his own admission, struggled to find the sound he really, really wanted to create. That inner battle is why he needed to create two other records before landing on Gravel & Gold.

“I came back to Nashville in ’21 and jumped right in the studio in March,” Bentley recalls. “I had a bunch of songs I had been working on that were part of it. So I had the songs and jumped in the studio with my guys in my band, and we were going to make the album. We’re all in. And what I realized is that no one was ready. I wasn’t ready mentally. I still had some more songs to write. You can’t discount the fact that people are still wearing masks and getting COVID tested every day in the studio. The studio environment is so
important.”

At one point, Bentley even hung a big picture of Buck Owens in the corner, to inspire the musicians — and maybe himself — in the studio. But even the visual didn’t help Bentley get the end result he was desperately seeking.

“You’re playing with the best musicians and some of the best producers in town in a great studio. It’s all B+, A- stuff. But It didn’t feel like the album, and we just weren’t ready. So we went back in again with a different kind of team six months later. And it was really cool. And that whole work, my buddy Luke Dick, who’s so good and he’s just so talented — we had songs in that realm. But I started realizing at that point that what this whole idea of a tenth album meant to me is that I want it to be a collection of everything I’ve done.”

Bentley realized that he wanted his tenth album to have all of his influences, including bluegrass music and ’90s country, along with some of the more current-sounding songs that he also enjoys. It was an arduous task that he came to realize ultimately fell solely to him.

“The only person who was going be able to do that was me,” Bentley acknowledges. “So I waited another six months. And, I also needed some more songs, I felt like. I went back and I called the players and booked the studio and did the whole production thing on my own, bringing more producers in to help me complete the vision. But it was just a feel thing. Like when I sip whiskey, I can’t tell you all the different flavors; I just know good or bad or great or wow. Those are the adjectives I use. … That third time around, I was like, ‘I’ve been grinding hard enough, been back in town long enough.’

“I had a vision for what I wanted to say,” he adds. “It just all came together. It was a long process, but I’m grateful I get to work with people who don’t get their feelings hurt. Everyone wants what’s best on the album.”

Gravel & Gold, which includes his Top 15 single, “Gold,” and his “Cowboy Boots” collaboration with Ashley McBryde, is available now at Dierks.com.