In the back of his tour bus somewhere in Toronto, country music star Dierks Bentley is overcome by the baggage he's accumulated. But despite the way it sounds, he's not looking for a way out. Instead, he simply tosses it out of his way and finds a place to sit.

"You know, we don't call this the back lounge, we call it the bag lounge," Bentley quips as he pans his phone around to reveal a jumble of suitcases and backpacks in the bus's common area. "It's just me and all the suitcases back here."

Bentley's penchant for metaphor is important here. His new album, Broken Branches, is an 11-song look at the knotted lives we live — and all their attendant baggage — built on the idea that we're all broken branches from the same tree. His concept runs deep through the album, and the idea of belonging to a larger community was central to the release party held in Nashville two days before its June 13 arrival. It wasn't just another industry party, and to Bentley, it wasn't even necessarily a celebration of him. Like the album itself, the occasion was an opportunity to raise up his people. 

"I was looking around at 30 years of friendships, from radio to publicists and TV producers, video producers, songwriters, musicians," the 15-time GRAMMY nominee says. "Everyone has their own little community within the larger community of country music, and I have some really great people in my little group."

While Bentley's community has long played a role in his remarkable career — which includes 22 No. 1 hits and membership in the Grand Ole Opry — it felt especially essential to Broken Branches. He partnered with friends new and old both in collaborations (the album features Riley Green and John Anderson, Miranda Lambert, and Stephen Wilson Jr.) as well as behind the scenes, taking more of a backseat on the writing to give other songwriters some shine.

But no matter how much involvement he had in each song, Bentley's passion for the characters and situations is palpable across Broken Branches. Bentley sings with conviction on ballads like "Standing in the Sun," a paean to enduring love and "Don't Cry For Me," an ode to the beautiful life he's built personally and professionally. On "Broken Branches," the album's playful centerpiece, the narrator — whose lines are swapped by Bentley with Anderson and Green — revels in a night partying with a bar full of "broken branches from the family tree."

The album's community-driven sentiment even drove Bentley to launch the Broken Branches Fund, an initiative in partnership with Music Health Alliance to provide mental health support for music professionals. "We're trying to take care of our people by recognizing the mental health challenges that exist [in our industry] and trying to find a way to raise support not only financially, but also just to get it out there to raise awareness of the needs," he adds.

Whether through the music, the live performances or the initiative, Broken Branches is proof that Bentley is as inspired as he's ever been. Below, in his own words, the country star discusses all the people, places and values behind the new album — and they all continued fueling his fire 30 years on.

When I first started going to concerts back in Arizona, that was the only place to find people who liked country music. Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson and Travis Tritt — that's where you went to find your people. It was a bonding thing, especially back then, when there's no iPhones, let alone social media. You found your people at country concerts, and you found them at the Rockin' Horse Saloon and the Rusty Spur, a couple of places in Scottsdale where I used to sneak in with a fake ID. 

Most people in the music business aren't from Nashville. We're from all over the place. In my band alone, we have Minnesota, Kentucky, Texas, myself from Arizona, and Mississippi, and that extends to my manager, who's from Florida. We all moved to Nashville because of country music, because we all love it so much. So it's this idea of this community of broken branches who left the family home and left the family tree, and we all planted ourselves in Nashville.

I love checking out what the new kids are doing in country music. There's certain people within that group that I gravitate towards more than others, and [Broken Branches Tour opener] Zach Top is one of them, Stephen Wilson Jr, Ella Langley, there's a lot. Zach Top, he's got that great obviously country sound, but he comes from a bluegrass background like Keith Whitley and Ricky Skaggs and Marty Stuart and Dwight Yoakam. A lot of them have that bluegrass background. So he's someone I'm really excited to be touring with, and I love watching his show. I'm pulling for him big time like a lot of people are in Nashville.

[Stephen Wilson Jr] and I got together to write a couple days together about a year and a half ago, you know, [when] he was driving around a station wagon with a donut for a tire. And it was so great to capture him at that time, before the rocket launched. I had the same experience with HARDY. He and I wrote a bunch of songs together during COVID, and I knew he was ready to take off as soon as it ended. So, it's just fun being with these artists before they really take that next big step. 

I think about the kids coming up today in the music business and all the social media requirements, pressure, expectations, demands, constantly feeding the machine. It's a lot to deal with, and it never ends. There's always something to be working on. You're always being compared to somebody else, you're always seeing other people post their best moments, and it's easy to feel like you're getting lost in the shuffle. So from an artist's standpoint, I really feel for them.

I wrote just as much for this record as I normally do. I wrote 70-80 songs, and at the end of the day I cut maybe three or four or five. [My manager] Mary Hilliard [Harrington] knows everyone in town, and she's able to go through a lot of songs and help me narrow it down. And I tell her and everyone, when you send me a song, I don't wanna know who wrote it, because if I know Ashley Gorley is on it I'm probably gonna be biased towards it, or Ross Copperman or Luke Dick.

At the [album release] party, I had a rough idea of who had written what, and I got to meet all the songwriters and put some of their names with the songs. I really just want the best songs without being prejudged, and I don't need to be involved at all. The song is just the brick for building the house, and I want the best bricks. I want the best songs to make the best album — that's all I care about. There's no ego. 

I've had plenty of albums where I wrote every song, and those might not have been my best albums. At the end of the day, I wanted to try to tell a story and make an album that's kind of like a book that has chapters and a beginning and an end, and to do that, you've gotta draw from a bigger pool of songs. 

I feel like any songwriter in Nashville, even the best, they're probably only writing two, maybe three smash hits a year, A-plus primo career songs, and I feel like I was able to get a few of those with "Jesus Loves Me" and "Standing in the Sun." Those are just incredible songs, and so I feel a lot of pressure recording those to make sure I do a good job to represent the songwriter's vision for what the song could be. Ultimately it's a selfish endeavor, because I'm just trying to get the best songs to make the best records, so I feel lucky to get pitched the songs I get pitched.

The good thing about the people I write with, they're not about to get worried about who's getting what. We just like spending time together, laughing and pushing each other and going for stuff, and that extends to the studio process to work with Jon Randall and Ross Copperman. They both told me separately, "Buddy, I [don't] care if I get any points on the record. I just want to help make a great record. That's all I care about." I believe them. They've really always been that way, so it's great work [to] with people that are confident and really just all about the music. From the musicians I work with, the songwriters and the producers, it's always been that way.

I get ideas for my own stuff all the time. Listening to music will sometimes inspire a different spinoff idea of something, and a great place to listen to music is driving. I've got a place west of town that's about an hour drive, so I listen to music, get out there and do a little fishing and spend some time out in the woods, and then an hour drive back in — that's where I first heard a song called "Off the Map," which really spoke to me in that particular moment because I was trying to find a way to get off the map for a little bit.

Those drives are a great place to listen to music and try to find those songs that really are a little bit left of center, a little unique. I guess they're a little bit like broken branches themselves; not the perfect ones, a little bit of a misfit, the ones that nobody maybe looks at. And I feel like I got a few of those on this record. 

When I was living out in Colorado for COVID, I was certainly off the map. I was kind of living my best life. But what I love about the song is that you can be off the map anywhere. It's just a state of mind, right? You can be on a bar stool, you can be on your couch. You can be on a mountain, you can be in the back of your tour bus surrounded by suitcases.

I've been kind of curating the band, and there's some guys that have always been there, like Bryan Sutton, who's been on my records playing acoustic guitar. Rob McNelley's playing some guitar, Jedd Hughes is playing a lot of electric guitars on the record, as well. Dan Dugmore on the steel guitar. Ben Helson, my guitar player out here on the road, he played on some stuff. Charlie Worsham, who's the [2024] CMA Musician of the Year from Mississippi, he plays in my band and also plays on a lot of the records, as well. Those session guys back in Nashville are pretty special.

I honestly have the greatest band on the road that you can possibly have, and I really mean that. Though they're all younger than me, we've been doing it for a long time and they've been doing it a long time before they started working with me. It's so fun to watch what they do and see people's reaction to it. I'm bringing the best of Nashville to their city. 

We start the show singing a song called "Well Well Whiskey," which is an acoustic, kind of bluegrassy thing, and that feeds right into "Up on the Ridge," and we're doing the whole thing tight, kind of like Del McCoury, close together, and we walk down the [stage] thrusts together. Then it leads to a little bit of an Infamous Stringdusters kind of jam that leads into "Burning Man." But I couldn't do that unless I really trusted the band. We're here to entertain and we're here to have fun. You're gonna see the best of the best.

Miranda [Lambert] and I have known each other for a long time, and we'd had a chance to collaborate before with Jamey Johnson on a song on my bluegrass record. But I'd never had just a straight-up collaboration with her, so I heard ["Never You"] and immediately thought of her.

Riley Green, who's on [the song] "Broken Branches," he's one of the first people I thought of as like, I need an up-and-coming young gun to be on this thing who's doing it his own way, and I feel like he's been out there with a machete carving his own path. And while I [was] watching him sing in the studio, I started thinking of the black sheep of the family, John Anderson. I was like, We could get one more person on here. There's a third verse, or the bridge, if we could find a way to get one more person, how cool it would be to have John Anderson, myself, and then represent the younger guys with Riley Green. So I got his number from a friend and called him up, and he came in. It was pretty cool to hang out with a guy whose music you've always loved and respected. 

He has an RV he drives himself to gigs, and it had broken down outside of Valdosta, Georgia, and he was spending a few days in a motel, with a hard M, waiting on it to get fixed. A Country Music Hall of Famer. And I asked him, "Do I need to get approval from your manager or record label?" He says, "I am the manager. I am the record label." He does it all. He is so unique that way. He's just never been part of the Nashville establishment, so he really is the ultimate broken branch, and what an honor to have him on that song.

The older I get, the longer I pray. I'm just grateful every day that I get with my kids. My kids are getting older and they're getting that independence and stuff. It's a big part of my life for sure.

Being a dad keeps you pretty grounded. Foremost, I feel lucky to get to do what I do, but definitely, 100 percent, my wife and my kids are what's real to me, and I never forget that.