Dierks Bentley Battled Heat Stroke and Rattlesnakes While Filming ‘Burning Man’ Video
“This song is a personal reflection and it was important to me that you feel that with the video,” said Bentley.
Dierks Bentley is having a killer year and shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. The father of three released his ninth album, The Mountain, for which he co-wrote 10 of the 13 tracks.
Now Bentley has released the brand new and visually jaw-dropping music video for “Burning Man,” which is one of the few tracks he didn’t write for the project.
“It stretches you as an artist,” Bentley said in an interview with Esquire. “If you write something, it’s probably something around the edges of your identity that you’re exploring. But a song like ‘Riser,’ which I didn’t write, or ‘Burning Man,’ that’s so outside of you, it takes a lot to get comfortable with it and understand it. You stretch into a whole new realm.”
Though he didn’t write the track about his own life, “Burning Man” (which features Brothers Osborne) reflects Bentley’s musical and personal evolution from a wild young man to a father reaching his mid-forties. Asking Brothers Osborne to be a part of this track was a creative and dimensional choice that Bentley believes takes the song to another level.
“I’m knee-deep in adulthood,” Bentley explains. “I thought it would be fun to sing [this] with someone who doesn’t have three kids and isn’t as far along as I am or as old as I am.”
The song uses powerful vocals, dynamic beats and a killer guitar performance from John Osborne to paint the picture of a restless spirit with feet firmly on the ground—a sort of tribute to the duality of man and middle-age.
“I live in these two completely different worlds,” Bentley says. “I’m in my house in Nashville right now and I’m about to fly to San Francisco to do a show. And it’s not just physical, but also mentally I am always switching gears and trying to be successful in both of them. One day I’m doing something with [my] four-year-old with a bunch of their moms and the next I’m on stage.”
The video shows off Director Wes Edwards’ cinematic talent as we fly back and forth between hauntingly romantic views in the desert off the coast of the California Salton Sea and Dierks performing in front of huge crowds.
“This song is a personal reflection and it was important to me that you feel that with the video,” said Bentley. “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!”
You can watch Bentley’s “Burning Man” video above, purchase The Mountain or stream all his songs on Spotify.
