Dierks Bentley on the “crazy” experience of seeing Breland write lyrics: “Like watching a mad scientist”

Dierks Bentley on the “crazy” experience of seeing Breland write lyrics: “Like watching a mad scientist”
ABC

Dierks Bentley’s latest single, “Beers on Me,” gets an assist from two of country music’s brightest up-and-comers, Hardy and Breland, each of whom had a hand in writing the song.

While Hardy lent his pen to “Beers on Me” in the kind of writing session that’s pretty standard for Dierks and his collaborators, Breland’s contribution came about in a way that’s a little more unorthodox.

It all started when Dierks played him the song — which, at the time, he thought was finished — and asked if Breland would like to sing a verse. Breland jumped at the opportunity, but asked if he could put his songwriter’s stamp on “Beers on Me,” too.

“We play the track over and over again, and he just started pulling things out of the air,” Dierks remembers. “Laughing to himself, messing with his hair…[I’m] like, ‘What is he doing?!’ And writing stuff on his phone. It was just like watching a mad scientist.”

The result? Lyrics so colorful and clever that Dierks had to think about them for a minute before he understood them. “You know, ‘I like my drinks like my roof — on the house.’ Like, ‘What does that mean? Oh my gosh, he likes free drinks!’” the star offers as an example.

“What he wrote was so well-written,” Dierks continues. “I feel like the rest of us had been painting with, like, six colors and he was using a paint set that had, like, 120 different colors to draw from.”

“Beers on Me” is currently inside the top 10 at country radio.

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