Dierks Bentley’s Interview With Foo Fighters Guitarist: 5 Things We Learned

Hank Williams Jr. was his gateway drug to country music.
Rock, metal and pop albums all had a place in Bentley’s tape collection as a teenager, but it was Hank Williams Jr.’s “Man to Man” that convinced him to focus on country music. “It was just testosterone-filled, rock & roll guitars, attitude. . .nothing I’d ever heard before in my life,” he says of the song, which appeared on Bocephus’s Lone Wolf in 1990. “Honestly, that’s one of three moments in my life where it’s like a coin going down a slot machine, and all the letters go click, click, click. Boom! I was 17 and I moved to Nashville two years later. I was hooked.”

5. Bentley’s first Number One album was cut in little more than a week.
These days, it can take a year or longer to piece together a concept album like Black. Eleven years ago, though, Bentley cranked out Modern Day Drifter in less than a dozen days, sandwiching the studio sessions between a seemingly infinite string of tour dates. “We were on the road over 300 dates that year,” he recalls. “I came off the road for 11 days and made this record in an 11-day stretch. You can do that when you’re single, but even then, it wasn’t the most enjoyable experience, because we were just hitting the road so hard. I really appreciate the way rock bands do it, when you’re touring and then you stop touring and make a record, and you set it back up again. That’s kind of what we did for the first time in my career with this record that’s about to come out. But usually, in country, nothing links up that way. We’re always touring, so it’s hard to get that downtime to make a record.”