‘Is He Pulling a Prank on Me?’

Dierks Bentley is known for his hit country songs such “Drunk on a Plane,” “I Hold On” and “Riser,” but he’s also an avid reader.

During an appearance on radio and television personality Bobby Bones’ BobbyCast, the two traded notes on some of their favorite books and recent books they’ve read (among the books Bentley named were Ulysses from author James Joyce and War and Peace from by Leo Tolstoy).

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At one point, Bentley recalled a story about an interesting gift he once received from fellow country music artist Tim McGraw.

“Want me to give you the greatest flex of all time? And he’ll probably appreciate this story, ’cause I don’t know if it’s true or not, if he did it on purpose,” Bentley said. “Tim McGraw, we were also talking about books one time, I don’t know where it was. He goes, ‘Let me send you some books,’ a big reader. He sent me a cardboard box full of books. Every book was this thick … it was like Russian — it wasn’t written in Russian, [but] a book about a Russian painter and this book about Eastern philosophy. I wish I had the whole collection because, with McGraw, you can’t tell, ‘Is he pulling a prank on me?’ Or, he could be totally serious, ’cause he’s a one-upper for sure … you go out on the road, he’ll flip that tire one more time than you.”

“He’s a competitive dude,” Bones said.

“He’s so competitive, so I still can’t tell to this day, I need to ask him. He’ll probably be like, ‘Of course I read those books.’ [It was] this huge collection of really thick history books, that I’m just like, ‘This has to be a joke,’ but maybe not.”

The conversation also turned to the topic of manifestation, as Bentley also noted how he took inspiration after a friend gave him a book by pastor and author Joel Osteen. “One of the things he said in that book, which I really agreed with, is ‘If you really want something, you gotta see it every day. If you want to go to Spain, get a postcard of Spain and put it on your refrigerator.’ Well… I really wanted to leave Nashville before COVID,” he said, adding that he wanted to be in Colorado or [Bentley’s home state of] Arizona. “I had this backpack, an old burlap sack and I hung it by the backdoor and put a piece of duct tape on it that said ‘West,’ and I had a flannel shirt in there. I’d look at it every day.”

Oddly enough, Bentley and his family were in Colorado when the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020. “I don’t want to say I was involved in manifesting COVID… We ended up living [in Colorado] for a year, which had been my dream. I was like, ‘How am I going to move my whole family to Colorado?’ We ended up staying there, the kids went to school there,” he said.

Bentley and Bones also talked about Bentley’s passion for flying and songs that fueled his desire to be a country singer-songwriter. Bentley just wrapped his headlining The Broken Branches Tour, in support of his Broken Branches album.

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