Few artists in mainstream country music have their finger on the pulse quite like Dierks Bentley. Just look at the rising artists he’s enlisted for past features: Billy Strings (“High Note”), Hardy and Breland (“Beers on Me”), Brothers Osborne (“Burning Man”), Molly Tuttle and Sierra Hull (a TV performance of “American Girl”), and an entire bluegrass album of cool pickers (2010’s Up on the Ridge). Bentley continues to prove his knack for identifying what’s on the verge by collaborating with Stephen Wilson Jr., one of country’s most fascinating new artists, on the song “Cold Beer Can.”
Written by Bentley and Wilson with Luke Dick and Jon Randall, “Cold Beer Can” mixes brooding alt-country verses with a mainstream sing-along chorus, and a song that isn’t quite what its title suggests. It’s not about the aluminum vessel or even the amber liquid inside, but rather what the ritual of sharing a drink can do.
“You look at the title, ‘Cold Beer Can,’ and you go, ‘Oh, it’s like a Nashville country lifestyle song,’ but then you see his name on there and go, ‘It’s probably not the usual Nashville country song,’” says Bentley, gesturing at Wilson, who’s seated to his right in a dimly lit East Nashville bar where the pair have been filming a video for the song. “Everything he writes is so left of center.”
Wilson, who sings and adds his distinctive percussive guitar playing to the track, says that the suds of the lyrics — “Nothing breaks the ice like a cold beer can” — are simply the catalyst for human connection. “A lot of people just need a reason to get together. The real healing happens in the experience. The beer has very little to do with it,” he says. “I think the point of the song is finding a common ground somewhere.”
For Bentley and Wilson, their bond is not only in country music, but in the loss of their fathers. Bentley’s dad died in 2012 and was memorialized in Bentley’s 2013 hit “I Hold On” (No. 182 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time), while Wilson processed the grief of losing his namesake in 2018 by writing songs like “My Father’s Son” for his 2023 debut double album, Son of Dad.
Bentley first heard Wilson’s breakthrough album during a regular listening exercise to discover artists who, he says, “are doing something a little different.” (He puts the Red Clay Strays and Hardy in that class too.) Wilson shies away from the praise.
“At the core of everything, I’m just a songwriter. I somehow became a singer. That was not part of the plan,” says Wilson, a former microbiologist who once worked in the R&D department of a food company. “When you think you’re done,” he adds, “sometimes the song ain’t done with you.”
Bentley raises his eyebrows at Wilson’s gift for turning such a phrase and excitedly offers that he has another song written with Wilson. Titled “Something Worth Fixin’,” it’s set to appear on Bentley’s upcoming album. “In life there are a lot of things worth fixing,” he says. “It’s a killer tune.”
“Cold Beer Can” celebrates fixing things, too — from busted alternators to fractured relationships and broken hearts. All over a frosty one. “Life is hard,” Wilson says, “but sometimes there’s an easier solution.” Adds Bentley: “There’s just something about how beer fosters community.”
Source link
