Draw Me A Map

Album: Up on the Ridge (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • This melancholy ballad is the second single from Country music artist Dierks Bentley's fifth studio album, Up on the Ridge. The song was written by Bentley and his buddy John Randall Stewart, who also produced the album.
  • The song features harmonies from multiple Grammy-winning Bluegrass-Country singer Alison Krauss. She is best known to many for her collaboration album with Robert Plant, Raising Sand.
  • Stewart told The Boot the story behind this song: "We were just throwing around some ideas and I can't remember how we came up with the words 'draw me a map that leads me back to you' at first ... maybe we were talking about traveling, I don't know. But we approached it from this groove that we both really love, it's by that band the Shins ... it's almost a bluegrass groove, but it's the way that that acoustic drives that whole track, and we started playing around with that. We needed something in that slot on this record, we didn't have anything like it. So we just started playing with these melody ideas, and Dierks threw out the first line and, there you go, you just start writing. It's kind of like we wrote ourselves into that chorus. And it sounds like Dierks.
    That line could be funny, really, but when you put it in a serious context and make a love song out of it, it's pretty strong. I think it works from both sides, too. I think guys really relate to that, that, 'Hey, what did I do? I don't even know what I just said?' But I think women want to hear that, too. They want to know that you're trying. What I like about it is most ideas have already been written. But I hadn't necessarily heard this idea before. Maybe it has been done before, and I'm sure someone's approached it, but I thought it was a really different angle for a song."

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