A year ago it was pretty much a given that one of the selections from “La La Land” was going to win Best Original Song. This awards season is a completely different story. Original compositions such as “This is Me” from “The Greatest Showman,” “The Mystery of Love” or “Visions of Gideon” from “Call Me By Your Name,” “Stand Up For Something” from “Marshall,” “Evermore” from “Beauty and the Beast” and “Truth to Power” from “An Inconvenient Sequel,” a number of potential players from Pixar’s “Coco” and even “I Don’t Want to Live Forever” from “Fifty Shades Darker” are all in the race for a nomination. One track that shouldn’t be discounted is the moving ballad “Hold the Light” from “Only the Brave.”
Written by country superstar Dierks Bentley, Joseph Trapanese, Sean Carey and Jon Randall, the song plays over a special end credits montage in the Joseph Kosinski directed drama. It’s also the first song the 14 time Grammy nominee has ever written or performed in a movie since he first hit the charts in 2003. The film tells the truest story of the Granite Mountain Hot Shots, an elite team of firefighters based in Prescott, AZ. An Arizona native, Bentley had performed in a benefit concert after the events depicted in the film a number of years ago.
READ MORE: ‘Only The Brave’ Is A Touching, Respectful Tribute To Fallen Heroes [Review]
“This movie, I thought it as going to be a documentary,” Bentley says. “It’s like a ‘Top Gun’ almost like a wilderness firefighters type energy movie. I’m really honored to these guys and their families. So, when they asked me to be part of it and to write a song with Joe Trapanese and I had a chance to jump on that song and work on that song and basically sing it and it got placed in the movie. It’s pretty heavy. And the song is kind of, is right there. So it’s pretty powerful stuff for sure.”
Trapanese is the composer of the film and has earned raves for his previous collaborations with Daft Punk on “Tron: Legacy,” Anthony Gonzalez of M83 on “Oblivion” and Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park on “The Raid: Redemption.” Bentley says that pedigree along with the presence of noted country songwriter Randall meant he couldn’t ask “for a better experience the first time being involved with something like this.”
“To work with Jon (Randall), he’s incredible. This guy, he’s just a one of the great song writers in Nashville,” Bentley says. “[There were some things] different the way Joe writes, a true composer of writing. Pencil and pen, write out the notes, scoring an entire movie. Working alongside of him and seeing the way he ties the melody of the note and can structure in the film how it all tied in this last song we wrote together, ‘Hold the Light.’ You kind of think the song is a hour and a half long whatever the hell long the movie is because all these pieces of the song are playing throughout the whole movie.”
As for the melody, that came from Trapanese, but also from Carey better known as a member of Bon Iver.
“I wrote the bridge of the song and I knew Eric Marsh, the leader of these ‘Hot Shots.’ He used to say ‘I’ll see you on this side or the other brother’ when they were going into to fight a fire,” Bentley says. “I was able to get that line in the bridge and put that in the song. It’s kind of a crazy thing, but they incorporated it in the song the way it was sincere. I think it worked.”
You can listen to the song in the context of the official video embedded below.
“Only the Brave” opens nationwide on Friday.
Hold The Light (From “Only The Brave” Soundtrack) (Official Video) by Dierks Bentley & S. Carey on VEVO.