Dierks Bentley Keeps Foot In Two Camps

Dierks Bentley photo by Jim Wright, courtesy of Capitol Nashville.

Aug. 5, 2009 — He’s a married man whose job is to party like he’s single, and that means Dierks Bentley has "the best of both worlds."

Touring is a rambling sport, and a singer and his band hit a town usually for just one night, establish a handful of business-related friendships, then move on to the next town. There’s a rush of energy on stage and a let down in the after hours, and it gets magnified for performers who go home to an empty house.

"When the lights go down, it can be kind of lonely," Dierks told The Altoona Mirror. "The fans don't think about that or care about that, but when you walk off the stage and you're feeling that energy, it's an amazing high, and it can be really hard to come off of that. In Nashville, for single guys living alone, it can be pretty damn lonesome."

That’s no problem for Dierks anymore. He’s married and has a 10-month-old daughter, Evalyn. Isolation is probably tough to find.

That home/road, family/career balance isn’t the only place where Dierks has a foot in two different worlds. As a country star with a rocker mentality, he’s trying to fit his artistic ideals inside a business that sometimes plays by a different set of rules.

"They say the way to be commercially successful in country music is to find something that works and just do it over and over again," he said. "In the rock world, they try to be different and do different things. I shoot for different ideas. I always want a live show to be well-rounded."

These days, he’s rounding out the show with a new No. 1 single. He’s being saluted next week on Music Row with a party for that song, "Sideways." Between now and then, Dierks the family guy will be on the road again with the American Saturday Night Tour, joining Brad Paisley and Jimmy Wayne in Chicago and Indianapolis.