When Maddie & Tae toured with Dierks Bentley last year, it was their first big tour and a great opportunity to learn from him.  Maddie Marlow says, “I think the biggest lesson that we learned with Dierks is you can’t just look over an audience.  Whenever you actually engage with a person on stage, look at them in the eye and look for that connection, that’s where great things happen and you get to touch people with your music and everything.”

Maddie says even now she’ll sometimes forget to directly connect with her fans because she says, “If I’m so concentrated on ‘okay, I need to do this and play this guitar chord’ then I forget about the important part.  And the important part is making sure the audience is really being impacted by your show and your music.”

Maddie & Tae are getting to put the lessons they learned from Dierks to good use on the road with Brad Paisley, someone else they’ll probably learn a lot from this summer.  They just released their new single, Sierra, off their debut album, Start Here.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/273328909″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Audio player not working?  Click here.

Maddie & Tae  :38 – biggest Dierks lesson  :29

Maddie Marlow – “I think the biggest lesson that we learned with Dierks is you can’t just look over an audience.  Whenever you actually engage with a person on stage, look at them in the eye and look for that connection, that’s where great things happen and you get to touch people with your music and everything.  And sometimes artists kinda forget that, and I honestly forget it too.  If I’m so concentrated on ‘okay, I need to do this and play this guitar chord’ then I forget about the important part.  And the important part is making sure the audience is really being impacted by your show and your music.”