Standing In The Sun

Album: Broken Branches (2025)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Standing In The Sun" is a love song dressed in meteorology: hurricanes of hardship, emotional snowstorms, and finally the sun, a metaphor for the warmth and comfort Dierks Bentley feels in loving his wife, Cassidy.
  • Bentley didn't write the song; it was penned by Kyle Sturrock, who earned a finance degree from Ohio State University before leaving his corporate job in 2018 to become a full-time songwriter in Nashville. He spent years waiting tables and writing songs - hundreds of them - before signing a publishing deal in 2022 and garnering credits with the likes of Chris Young ("Gettin' Older") and Blake Shelton ("Texas").
  • Dierks Bentley was quickly drawn to Kyle Sturrock's track. "This is one of those songs that I never in a million years could have written on my own, but I'm so glad someone in this town did and gave me temporary custody of it for awhile," Bentley said. "Love is such a classic theme in country music, but Kyle was able to write it in a way that is so personal to me... it's the way I feel it."
  • Jon Randall and Ross Copperman produced the song. "I love how sonically it builds to feel like a sunrise, tying back to the lyric of the song," Bentley said.
  • The accompanying music video was filmed in a single take at sunrise on Bentley's farm just outside Nashville, capturing the natural beauty and emotional honesty of the song.
  • "Standing in the Sun" found a home on Broken Branches, Bentley's 11th album. He reportedly listened to nearly 4,000 songs before whittling down to a final tracklist: seven found songs and four he co-wrote.

    "I'm always looking for the ones that are kind of the broken branches of music," Bentley told People. "Not the real popular ones, the songs that are the forgotten misfits that say something kind of quirky and weird and then seeing what we can do with them. I love finding great music."

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