Songfacts®:

• Over a laid-back musical backdrop, Dierks Bentley sings about the stifling Music City culture. Bentley wrote "You Can't Bring Me Down" with Luke Laird (Carrie Underwood's "So Small," Little Big Town's "Pontoon") and Hillary Lindsey (Carrie Underwood's ("Jesus, Take The Wheel," Little Big Town's "Girl Crush.") The song was recorded along with the rest of The Mountain at the Studio in the Clouds just outside of Telluride, Colorado, where the country star had a vacation home.
• You can try to wrap your words like rocks around my ankles
  And push me off a bridge and hope that I might drown
  Any cheap shots that you've got yeah I can handle
  You don't get this far without knowing how to get up off the ground
  
  The song's empowering lyrics were inspired by some Nashville gossip. "A friend was talking about Music Row and gossip," he told Rolling Stone Country , "which is part of the reason I made my album outside of Music Row, because it can be like high school. It's just a lot of the same writers, and gossip central. So I said to him, 'Dude, it can't bring me down.' That's the truth."
• The song features some excellent mandolin picking in the background from renowned Kentucky musician Sam Bush. The bluegrass legend appears on two other The Mountain tracks.