Dierks Bentley Checks In From High Times & Hangovers Club Tour
The run of small clubs made Bentley one of the first country stars back on the road, and he made the most of every minute.
Dierks Bentley has spent the last week becoming one of country’s first artists back on the road, wrapping up his High Times & Hangovers Tour in Knoxville on Saturday (May 15). The throwback run saw him hitting the stage in five small clubs over five bleary-eyed nights — so basically, jumping back into the deep end after a whole year off. But the hiatus doesn’t seem to have slowed him down.
With videos posted to social media of the star passing out beers and even doing a little body surfing, he’s been hard at work giving fans everything they’ve been missing. And according to him, that’s because he’s all about picking up where he left off.
“It’s just been fun, and I’ve tried to not make it more than that,” Bentley told reporters ahead of the tour’s final two shows. “It feels like nothing happened.”
Getting back on stage has been a dream of both fans and artists since COVID-19 shut down live events back in March of 2020. Now that they’re coming back, Bentley says he’s just as fired up as anyone else — he just happens to be one of the first to pull the trigger. And with so much to be grateful for, he’s not about to bring the mood down with too much COVID talk.
“It’s felt so great, my voice is even a little thin just from doing multiple shows in a row,” he said via video call. “It’s a great feeling to be back out there and in a lot of ways, there’s a lot of different emotions. Looking out from these stages, I’ve played all these rooms before, so there’s the general flashback of ‘Wow, we’re back in these country bars.’ And then of course, there’s all that happened last year. But for the most part it’s about blocking all that out to focus on the show, and seeing the elation in fans faces — and my band’s faces as well.”
Crowding fans into tiny bars across the Southeast may have seemed totally unacceptable a few months ago. But now, with vaccinations available for all fans old enough to attend the shows, the country star seized his opportunity. The High Times & Hangovers Tour marks the fourth time Dierks Bentley has returned to small clubs in his career — a habit he and tour mate Cody Canada picked up long ago. But in some ways, he’s been doing electrifying-yet-intimate performances like these all along. Bentley is a guy who brings a lot of energy to the stage, no matter how big it is.
“I always try to make big venues feel like a small club,” he explained. “I only know how to do live music one way, and that’s the reason I didn’t do any of the drive-in shows or virtual concerts [in 2020]. It’d be like asking a NASCAR diver to go out and do Daytona in third gear or something. I just only know one way to go out there, and that’s to follow the muse and get after it. Full throttle like we always have.”
Still, you can’t welcome fans back to the concert experience without acknowledging an entire year without live music, so Bentley’s starting each show with his current single, “Gone.” The track imagines a guy checking out of his life after a bad breakup, and he says that’s sort of how he felt in 2020. He moved his whole family to Colorado to wait it out, and only recently returned to the Nashville area.
“It’s a good way to quickly get back,” he said of the tune. “We’re in this room all together, no one’s wearing masks, we’re on tour again — but we’ve been gone, and then we just get right back into the show.”
The single is one of two new songs Bentley’s been showcasing, along with the sudsy new “Beers On Me,” which will soon become the title of his summer amphitheater tour. That run kicks off August 13 with Riley Green and Parker McCollum, but looking further ahead, “Gone” is also the first taste of what will eventually become his tenth studio album. The milestone aspect of that number hasn’t escaped Bentley, and after having so much time to wonder about what comes next, he aims to make this one special.
He’s not looking to do a double (or triple) album like some of his country-star peers, Bentley cautions, offering praise for artists like Eric Church, Thomas Rhett and Morgan Wallen. But the set will still hold an important place in his story. In fact, the writing and recording process is already underway and so far features another kind of return for Bentley — back to some of his best loved tunes.
“I can’t believe this is the tenth one,” he admits about the project, “but I’ve been taking my time. I went in the studio with my band and was working with Brett Beavers from my first records, and Jon Randall is also co-producing, who did the Up On the Ridge album. So we’ve got a unique combination of those sounds.
“[I’m] just experimenting a little,” he went on. “I worked with David Garcia on that, and have some stuff going with Ross Copperman, so I’m kinda just using this COVID craziness to experiment with new sounds. They’re still a work in progress, but I don’t feel too stressed about that. I have another song or two as choices for a single to put out before the record.”
No matter when it does finally arrive, Dierks Bentley knows one thing for sure: It will be worth the wait — just like getting back onstage.
“Every record feels like it has the pressure of a tenth album when you’re creating it,” he says. “I’m proud of them all and they’ve all been a step forward. [My last album] The Mountain is a really special record, so I’m just trying to think of how to make this one equally special — or even more so.”
