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Summary
Bobby Bones, dubbed “the most powerful man in country music” and youngest Radio Hall of Fame inductee, attributes his success to an intense work ethic and unwavering authenticity. Despite a multi-million dollar Netflix deal and a $100 million iHeart contract, Bones emphasizes his humble beginnings and not being money-motivated. His radio career began at 18, taking the name “Bobby Bones” for its human sound. He strives for honesty, even feeling disingenuous about his stage name. Bones carefully curates his content, focusing on country music and pop culture, avoiding politics, and building a relatable persona. He defines success as the ability to say no, having overcome a challenging past through therapy and relentless work. Beyond radio, he’s an author, comedian, and musician, known for his signature glasses and listening skills in interviews. He produces 20 hours of content weekly, managing a demanding schedule.
When you’re called “the most powerful man in country music,” served as a mentor on American Idol, competed on Dancing with the Stars, and now have a multi-million dollar deal with Netflix for The BobbyCast as well as a $100 million dollar overall talent deal with iHeart all for doing radio, then a lot of people might make a lot of assumptions about you. But if you’re Bobby Bones, the youngest inductee into the Radio Hall of Fame (at age 37 in 2017), you deal with it by outworking all of them and making authenticity an ethos. “I don’t think I’m lucky by any means,” he told me as part of our Zoom interview, by which he means his intense work ethic got him to where he is today, “but I am fortunate. My dad worked at a sawmill his whole life, and now I have a company and a team that’s supported me even when things happen like getting fined a million dollars by the FCC.” It’s a funny story that he can laugh at now, but couldn’t laugh about at the time. And he put that aforementioned team together by himself, built around people he liked and wanted to work with that do a great job, which he called “the greatest gift to being a professional”.
Bobby might as well have been talking about
Bobby might as well have been talking about his origin story in radio here as he related to me how at five or six years old, while being raised by his grandmother, he knew he wanted to work in radio and do standup comedy. That feeling never left him, and by the time he was about 18 years old he begged a local radio station for a job, and they let him clean up the lobby and work the control board for Rick Dees’ Weekly Countdown. When someone was fired for stealing equipment, they felt they had no one to turn to in order to fill a crucial time slot and they put him on the air—and Bobby Bones was born (real last name Estell). But if they hadn’t liked Bobby being around and he didn’t do a great job with what they gave him, then that opportunity would never have happened.
And still to this day despite the fact that he’s known the world over by his stage name and not his last name by birth, he still thinks about it.
”The irony of it all is”, he says, “I’ve spent my entire career trying to be as honest and authentic, not relatable, but at least truthful as possible, and to do that with a fake name has always felt disingenuous.”
A lot of people talk a big game
A lot of people talk a big game about being authentic, but I don’t think I’ve ever talked to someone that’s worked so hard to truly live it out publicly through a variety of fields.
“I love sports and it’s hard for me not to talk about sports on my main radio show (The Bobby Bones Show), but fortunately I have other outlets and do a sports podcast with former quarterback Matt Cassell (Lot’s to Say). If I were to start doing content on everything that I personally consume, I’d probably be talking politics, but I don’t because I’m disciplined enough to know what people come to me for.”
If you didn’t know, people come to him (I think) because they love country music, pop culture, and nostalgia, as well as his willingness to be so open and talk about anything that people treat him as a friend or family member. I was watching a recent episode of The BobbyCast and he was asking a married woman if her kids belonged to her husband and she responded “Oh Bobby” in the same way you might address your brother or sister for pulling a prank on you.
This is a man that puts himself out
This is a man that puts himself out there professionally so much that he says if not for his wife he probably would have live streamed his daughter’s birth (back in March).
And in fact he still says that nothing is off limits, but between being married and having a few security scares he says that “some of the more personal stuff will have to be time shifted.”
Looking back on his origin story I realized that his authenticity was baked in from the beginning because he said the radio station gave him two options for on air names for what became his big break – Bobby Z or Bobby Bones, and he went with Bones because it least sounded like a human or “maybe a pirate or a dentist doctor.” And in that most vulnerable of moments when he was just a kid trying to make it into his dream of radio he didn’t just pick whichever one sounded cooler, he picked the one that sounded human.
I never wanted to be an abbreice and did traditional radio talk
Like anybody thrown into the proverbial fire
Like anybody thrown into the proverbial fire that lived, Bones figured it out along the way. “ I tried so hard to be that guy. I would affect my voice, and I would try to emulate other DJs like Rick Dees, or Casey Kasem, they all had that great DJ voice, and I couldn’t do it. So the way that I found to be successful wasn’t because I had some idea of, oh, this is how I’m going to do it. It was mostly out of necessity, because I couldn’t get it to work the way that I was trying to do it.”
He says that success now looks like “being able to say no to something,” because at first he would say yes to almost everything, first to pay the bills, and then for himself to prove his worth. But he offers a major caveat to that, “I’ve never been money motivated, and I think the advantage of coming from so little is I never had to leave comfortable, so I never had anything to lose, ever.”
Now If you heard someone say they never had a dad, their mom was a drug addict, and they were raised by their grandmother in a trailer park then you would probably think that the fact that they stayed out of jail was a pretty good accomplishment, let alone being a content making machine for radio. For the record he offers up therapy and his incredible amount of hours of being on the air live for dealing with anger about his past as well as the imposter syndrome he used to live with.
That willingness to push himself out
That willingness to push himself out of his comfort zone and to trust his instincts has led him to not just his multiple radio shows and podcasts, but also being an author of two books, and that standup comedian he always wanted to be in a special called Comedically Inspirationalthat blends his unique style of storytelling with musical comedy from his band Bobby Bones & The Raging Idiots that his best friend, producer, and frequent on air collaborator Eddie is in with him. Just listen to Grandmother Song and tell me you aren’t a fan.
Humble as always he grades his comedy as a “B-minus” that he worked really hard at and says is the second hardest thing he’s done besides dancing. “You go up and it’s just you and there is nothing else.”
I wrote a whole book on things that didn’t go well (Fail Until You Don’t), which, you know, kind of sucked (the things themselves, not the book). So yeah, it’s (writing the book) been awesome. People do feel like they know me, and I think that’s probably the greatest compliment that I can get if somebody just comes up and starts talking to me like we’ve known each other forever. It’s also very confusing, though, because I will go, “Oh, my God, do I know this person? And why do I not know their name?” And it turns out I’ve never met them ever.
The next thing Bobby said to me I
And the next thing Bobby said to me I have a feeling will stick with me for the rest of my life. He explained that he meets so many people and some of them he might have met before and doesn’t want to offend anyone so instead he says “Good to see you.” Which as he rightly points out “is always true.”
After being in the public eye for so long, his glasses are a big part of his signature look and I kind of compared him to Spider Man with those glasses being his secret identity, wondering why he doesn’t get eye surgery, and his answer surprised me again. “I have 8% vision in my right eye”, and his doctor as a kid told him he needed to protect them and there was nothing he could do for his right eye. So he wore the glasses because as a nerdy kid he loved Buddy Holly and Weezer and they were “super cool.” And in fact he does like to brand things and in addition to the glasses he’s only worn cardigans for the last two years because he doesn’t want to have to worry about what to wear every day, and for a guy who makes 20 hours of content a week I can understand wanting one less thing to worry about.
Listening and not being afraid of silence.
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And the whole time we were talking he let me know that he had someone else he was talking to coming in shortly after me in a way that put me perfectly at ease and I never felt rushed for a second even when he described his busy schedule as being something like the circus performer Red Panda spinning plates over her head. “I feel that way sometimes,” he said. “My brain was so tired this morning that I was using the turn signal in the parking garage, and there’s no turn signal needed in the parking garage.”
Oh Bobby!
It was good to see you.
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Bobby is on the air five hours every weekday morning with The Bobby Bones Show and The BobbyCastputs out new episodes every Tuesday and Thursdayon Netflix.
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