Greatest Hits: Every Mile a Memory

1	Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go) 3:21
2	Trying to Stop Your Leaving 3:42
3	Sweet & Wild 4:49
4	Come a Little Closer 4:42
5	How Am I Doin' 3:48
6	Every Mile a Memory 3:54
7	My Last Name 3:30
8	Lot of Leavin' Left to Do 4:33
9	With the Band 3:46
10	Settle for a Slowdown 3:43
11	What Was I Thinkin' 4:21
12	Long Trip Alone 3:44
13	So So Long Bonus Track 3:44
14	Come a Little Closer Bonus Track 5:46
15	Lot of Leavin' Left to Do Bonus Track 5:43
16	Wish It Would Break Bonus Track 4:33
17	Free and Easy Bonus Track 3:43

Barnes & Noble

More so than many of his contemporaries who have risen to arena-level popularity, Dierks Bentley has never forgotten to take his cues from country first, and let the rock propulsion drive but not overshadow the content of his music. His is state-of-the-art mainstream country, with a generous helping of acoustic instruments and crying pedal steel supporting Bentley's gritty, personable baritone. Like George Strait, he's covered the waterfront of feelings, and done so credibly enough to have notched ten Top 10 singles and five chart toppers in a mere five years. For his first of what will likely be many volumes of greatest hits, Bentley shows off what he brung to the dance, from stomping, sarcastic kiss-offs ("How Am I Doin'"), to roaring, self-deprecating treatises on lustful, inadvisable behavior ("What Was I Thinkin'"), to surging, guitar-driven reflections on the loneliness of the road in "Every Mile a Memory," which connects the beauty of nature to an abiding passion for an absent lover. Two new cuts join the hit parade: "With the Band" is a thumping country-rock workout centered on the carefree aspects of the musicians' lifestyles; more substantial is the only song Bentley had no hand in writing, "Sweet & Wild," from the pen of the redoubtable Radney Foster (co-writing with Jay Clement)," a captivating, densely textured midtempo celebration of love's sensual pleasures, aided and abetted by the always captivating Sarah Buxton adding a companion vocal. Five tracks are exemplary live cuts selected by Bentley's fans, all of whom are thanked by name in the liner notes. These are the icing on a 17-track cake that gets better with each new serving. Seconds, anyone? David McGee

All Music Guide

There are no two ways around it: Greatest Hits: Every Mile a Memory seems to arrive a little early in Dierks Bentley's career, appearing in May 2008, just five years after his self-titled debut album. In those five years Bentley released just three albums -- not a lot to build a greatest-hits album on, so the album is pumped up with two pretty good new songs (the smooth midtempo love song "Sweet & Wild" and the peppier "With the Band'") and five live tracks chosen by fans (three of them live repeats of songs heard in their studio incarnations earlier on the album), bringing the track total up to a respectable 17 tracks. These are nice bonuses, but the real worth of Every Mile a Memory is the same as any greatest-hits album: it's a place to get all the hits in one tidy package, and this has all of Bentley's charting singles between 2003 and 2008 minus "Domestic, Light and Cold," which scraped the bottom of the country charts in 2005. Taken together, these singles make Bentley out to be more of a straight-ahead balladeer than his proper albums do, but anybody frustrated by this development will already have his three albums. This is for the casual fans -- along with those hardcore fans who helped pick the five live tunes here under the enticement of being listed as executive producers in the album's liner notes -- and for those fans it gets the job done nicely. Stephen Thomas Erlewine