Dierks Bentley's process of creating his most recent album, The Mountain, marked a sharp left turn for the country singer. From his songwriting process in small-town Colorado to his DIY recording process, Bentley abandoned conventional tactics for a grassroots approach -- and he says he loved it.

"We really had a lot of fun," Bentley explained during a recent press event. "We were writing out at the house in Telluride. We had taken some trash cans and set [songwriter and producer Ross Copperman]'s computer up on top of that. We set up some boxes for speaker mounts, and sat on the floor with the microphone cable running through the room."

Will this unconventional recording style become a regular occurrence for Bentley's studio albums? Not necessarily, he says, but the process did teach him how imaginative the creative process could be.

"I think I learned from this record that you can come up with creative ideas and really go for them," he goes on to say. "[Recording this album], it ended up becoming, like, 'How far can we push this thing before we're told to rein it back in?' Luckily, no one told us to rein it back in."

Bentley says that a critical part of making The Mountain involved a change of scenery. "Next record, we'll probably look for another location to do it," he adds.

"As you get older, it's kind of about combining an experience with whatever it is you're working on -- like, going to Iceland for the video for "Black" was awesome. I'd never been to Iceland and would have wanted to go either way, even if it wasn't part of the video shoot," Bentley says. "So being out in Colorado and having an excuse to hang out there, it definitely played into the whole concept, and it was fun to create something outside of Nashville."

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