Dierks Bentley makes the most of his roles on ‘Home’

If you’ve ever looked down your nose at country music, it might be because so many artists seem to suffer some form of multiple-personality disorder.

To wit: Dierks Bentley’s new album, “Home,” finds him cast as lover man, party bro, proud patriot, dedicated dad. Throughout his career, he has gone from bar-crawling lothario to devoted husband from one song to the next.

But so what? Like an actor playing a role, great country singers inhabit their songs and make them sound like they’re living it all right before your ears. When it works, it feels Oscar-worthy. When it doesn’t, it feels suspect, like a politician doling out sweet nothings on the stump.

Dierks Bentley is a great country singer.

“Home,” out Tuesday, is his seventh and most assured album, with the 36-year-old Arizona native singing from an array of vantage points with a sure-footedness that wasn’t always totally there. He’s penned a few goofy party anthems over the years, but with the indelible gallop of “Am I the Only One,” you can finally taste the beer. Elsewhere, he’s a homesick family man, a nine-to-fiver pining for escape and a jilted lover in denial.

Bentley says it’s no act. “I’ve been the guy who had the broken heart where your hair falls out in the shower,” he says. “With country music, you have to be a little older and have gone through life. I can hear great singers who have never had their heart broken. I can hear it right away.”

Lounging on his tour bus outside the Recher Theatre in Towson, Md., on Super Bowl Sunday afternoon, Bentley is on the road promoting an album that has to please a wide swath of fans without sacrificing conviction. After 2010’s “Up on the Ridge,” Bentley’s stellar, bluegrass-y left turn of a record, “Home” steers things back toward the pop charts. Unlike most of Bentley’s previous albums, this one finds the singer doing what so many of his peers do — tapping into Music Row.

Nashville songwriters supply six of the 12 songs, giving Bentley new roles to play, but ones that he thinks reflect his true self. “The fans love the songs,” he says. “If you wrote it, great. If you didn’t, whatever.”

What mattered was Bentley’s tenacity in injecting himself into those songs, says producer Luke Wooten, who has been working with Bentley for the singer’s entire professional career. “I don’t know that he ever sleeps,” Wooten says. “If he’s got production ideas, you may get a text at 2:30 in the morning.”

That drive helped Bentley get a leg up when he arrived in Nashville in 1994. The singer remembers being 18 years old and struggling to navigate an industry town suddenly swarming with Wrangler-and-Stetson clones hoping to become the next Garth Brooks. The disillusionment was almost instantaneous.

“It was like seeing the wizard behind the curtain,” he remembers. “It lost a little of its magic.”

He found a different kind of magic when a friend dragged him to the Station Inn, the bluegrass club where Bentley fell under the spell of banjos, fiddles and mandolins. He still endeavored to make popular country songs in the mold of Hank Williams Jr. and Merle Haggard, but he made a point to pepper each album with a little bluegrass.