Dierks Bentley and Nashville Celebrate the Country Song That Almost Never Was and a New Direction with his New Single

That’s right, “Somewhere On a Beach” was not written with the intent of being a top-charting country song.

Unofficially dubbed the continuation of the 2014 smash-hit ‘Drunk On a Plane,” the hook for first single off of Dierks Bentley’s newest studio album BLACK actually began as the foundation for a potential hip-hop song out in Los Angeles by songwriters-producers Alexander Palmer and Dave Kuncio, whom have a slew of artists such as Chris Brown and Selena Gomez to their credits. Unbeknowest to them, a trip to Destin, FL implanted the title for the track, the lyrics being brought to life over a several week span between Nashville songwriters Michael Tyler, Jaron Boyer and Josh Mirenda. Palmer brought the demo from LA to Nashville on a trip, and after a bit of mastering, the songwriters, friends, family and the country music community amassed at South on Demonbreun to celebrate the song that became Bentley’s 14th number one single.

“I can’t imagine my career without this song,” Bentley informs a group of gathered press during a conference for his newest accolade. And essentially it is the perfect gateway to bridge the old and the new – with BLACK becoming Bentley’s most personal and defining album of his career, the multi-platinum selling artist is relieved to see the draw of new fans while respecting and honoring his long time supporters. “I’ve lost so much sleep over these last two single choices – I think it was a different style of song for me, and so is ‘Different For Girls.’

In regards to the second single, “It came out really organically, it really did,” Bentley told The Country Note during the sit-down. “Elle King – that song “Different For Girls” – we needed to have a girl on a song called “Different For Girls.” Even though we already had Maren (on “I’ll Be the Moon”) it was like ‘Gosh it would be awesome just to keep going down this road. Keep more on this road.’ I had already written some other songs with Hillary Lindsey, Jessi Alexander, and Natalie Hemby, so I kind of had this thing going on. And then Elle came right back to us, and we flew down there to Austin to record her and it was a really magical situation. And it’s a real collaboration – it’s a real friendship now. I mean I’m even good friends with her mom. Her mom sends me videos all the time of her singing “Somewhere On A Beach” and stuff so we’re really good pals now. It’s a real honest collaboration and I never really had that in my career before.”

Now with BLACK‘s second single climbing the country charts, Bentley is already in the process of planning the third single, continuing to expose the concept album that is changing the course of his career.”You want to put out songs that are good for live show and good for radio, but also I want to put out songs somehow that gets to what the album is about,” Bentley says of his future releases off of BLACK. “It’s a relationship based record. And so you only get 3-4 singles you know and you really only have people’s attention for the first couple if they’re not really hitting hard. I wanted to get right into it so getting this duet out with Elle now and kind of diving into the record and the dialogue that exists in the record was really important to me and I’m just glad to see it working.”