Dierks Bentley: ‘You Gotta Have A Big Turkey’
Everyone is country music is excited for Thanksgiving, and Dierks Bentley is no exception. And like many other Americans, he feels that there is one necessary component for a Thanksgiving dinner.
“You gotta have a big turkey. Thanksgiving is not possible without a turkey. We cook it traditionally, but when we’re in, a couple of Thanksgivings ago, we were here in Nashville, we did the whole fry the turkey up, and it was great. It just tasted so good; all those juices get locked in there, and I love that too. You really can’t, to me, cook a turkey wrong. I’m gonna eat it anyway, and I have over the years. Trust me, I’ve played a lot of county and state fairs, where I’ve seen gigantic turkey legs, you know, I’ve had the flat meat. I’ve done turkey every way you could do it. I’m pretty good any way you want to cook it up, but you’ve got to have a turkey for Thanksgiving.”
Dierks Bentley: His Cover Of Tom Petty’s “American Girl”
One of the highlights of the recent CMA Awards was Dierks Bentley’s cover of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ classic anthem “American Girl.” He was joined for the performance by Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull, Brownyn Keith Hynes. Watch the performance below.
As you can see, Dierks reimagined the rock and roll classic as a bluegrass song; he originally recorded it for Petty Country: A Country Music Celebration of Tom Petty, which was released earlier this year. He told us, “It’s always a big challenge [to] reimagine a song that really doesn’t need to be reimagined. You know, it’s like your favorite movie that someone’s gone and redone again. You’re like, ‘Why?’ The original was so good. But we wanted to do it anyway. So, we knew going into it, we wanted to keep the core essence of what the song is, that energy, the vocals kind of on that knife’s edge that’s just got this angst behind it.”
He added, “I feel like our track is something you could listen to, and you’ll go, oh, that’s definitely Dierks’s version of Petty. They didn’t lose the original. You know, it’s like the national anthem. You want to stay pretty close to the original, but you got to give your own little flair. And I feel like we did in this one. It really turned out great. I was so excited when I walked out of the studio.”
