Interview: Toby Keith

Since debuting with his eponymous album in 1993, Toby Keith has gone on to become one of the most prolific and celebrated artists of the country world. With his 18th studio album, 35 M.P.H Town, proving as popular with the fans and critics as his early work, we caught up with Toby to see how the changing music world has altered his ambitions.

Hi Toby, first up can you tell us about the new record...

It's been about two years in the making. For years every November/October we have had an album release and when the record labels went away and the way the business side of the music business became, we spread it out over two years. We used to release and album then put out the singles, now you put out two or three singles then the album and hope people by the end product and not just the singles. So we spent two years making it and we had the song Drunk Americans and the song 35 M.P.H Town, which is the title cut. Then I wrote a song late on in to recording the album called Rum Is The Reason and I have Beautiful Stranger out as my current single. It just takes three or four singles now before we put an album out, so we went through that process but now it's out. I am proud of it.

Do you like the way the music industry has evolved?

As a songwriter the changes haven't been great for me. I always like to write all year, then take my best songs and put those in an album and showcase them. Album sales isn't where it's at anymore. It's now a singles world. In order for people to buy your music now, it has to be heard as a single and get exposure on that. Many people just buy a single. Like I said, when I started you recorded an album then the single was just pulled from it to promote it and people listened to the whole product. This is now just backwards.

Do you think people will ever return to favouring a body of work as opposed to the single?

I don't see how. It will vary from artist to artist. My hardcore fans still buy the whole album, but in the digital world, I just don't see how it would ever flip. The way they present music and sell it would have to change. I don't ever see that happening. It is what it is, you just live in that environment.

Do you hanker after the times when people favoured physical music?

I do miss that and I remember that. When I started they would always schedule appearances at those mega record stores. You would go sit in them for a couple of hours on the release date. I remember one time, when I released Unleashed, I was in Chicago and it completely shut down Michigan Avenue. I had a big song out and they were all just lined up to get a signed copy of the albums. Sadly the digital days means those days are long gone.

How would you say you have evolved as an artist over the last 20 years?

I'm a better songwriter. As you work at it, it does get better. It doesn't take me as long to prepare. Back then I didn't know that when you got an album out there, that you had to start working on the next one. I remember when I was on my first album and the singles were going number 1 and we got to the third single and they told me they would only do one more single from the album and they wanted the next album ready. I was sat there with nothing. I had to start working on the album immediately and tried to write the next album. I learnt through the years that I had to be prepared, so I now write all the time. At any stage I could go record another album as I now have the songs ready.

When working on a new song, do you have a gut feeling as to whether it will work well or not?

It doesn't happen very often, but there are times when you get halfway in to writing a song and you hit a block where you know it doesn't have that hit factor. At that point I just quit and move on to another song. Most of the time, if I am halfway into writing a song, I will like where it is going. There's a song on this album called Haggard, Hank and Her. It's real traditional, country sound. My friend Bobby Pinson had the idea and he was singing it to me to show me what he wanted to do with it. He really had to shove it down my throat as it sounded very amateurish to me. It sounded like a song every person that goes to Nashville would have in his repertoire. By the time we'd finished the first verse I knew it was much more than that. That doesn't happen very often though. I don't usually let it get that far. I never could grasp writing something that trite, do you know what I mean?

How do you distinguish a single from an album track?

I was on a record label for ten years and most the time I struggled to get the things heard that I wanted heard. We really struggled with the labels. They didn't want Talk About Me or Beer For My Horses to be singles. I remember there were two or three like that where we had to really fight with them. There were many times when they had selected a different song. I remember sitting on the phone one morning answering with the council from the label, telling them they had to put a song out and they said no, they would maybe consider it at a later date. They didn't want to put the money on the line for what might or might not be a hit, they wanted to put out what they thought was an automatic hit in When Love Fades. We had been out about 7 or 8 weeks and had visibility everywhere. Posters were everywhere and our song was low in the charts and stayed there. I rang 20 or 30 of my radio friends and they were in love with the other song, so I told them to just start spinning it. That was on the Thursday and on the Monday I got a call from the label and they told me they would drop the other single. It was obviously the right choice as we sold 3 million songs and the album became record of the year. I haven't had that problem in the last 11 years as I own my own record label. But back to the original question, I do know that something is probably a single and something is an album cut. You know what you have.

The country scene has changed a lot in the last two decades. Do you still perceive the sound as distinctively country?

It's really weird because when I came in, the guys who'd been around years did not call us country. I thought I was as country as the people I grew up listening to. They weren't specifically saying I wasn't country, but they were saying what was being played on the radio was more pop than when they were new on the radio. But I think it has drastically changed now. It doesn't sound like country any more to me. It all sounds alike. Somebody put a track together in the studio that has the music playing with six different #1 songs played together. It's all the same music just with different people singing. When you listen to the radio everything sounds alike and somebody brilliant shows you are right when they lay it all together. There is a reason it is sounding so similar. There's a big influence from the hip hop world going on right now. But at the end of the day I don't care. You can't worry about how things change. I'm not going to change the way I write. My fans will listen to my stuff. I have been blessed with my fans and they like the sound I work with. And they will have their fans. Everyone is just being creative at the end of the day.

There's lots of people in the new cycle that still make more traditional music. I personally wouldn't know how to write a bro country song, do you know what I mean? I am sure there are people who write those songs that have ideas for songs that don't fit that world. So when they write a more traditional song that they wouldn't record, they find an artist that they feel could do it justice. Some people are great at doing that, but I just know it's something that I couldn't do.

Lastly, is there anyone you still dream of collaborating with?

I kind of filled my bucket list through the years. I had a #1 wrote that Willie sang on. He recorded another song I wrote on one of his albums. I got to sing with Merle Haggard on one of his albums. Then I got to work with Jimmy Buffett on a couple of projects and he sings on this record. He made a video for a song I made with him called Too Drunk To Karaoke. That was kind of my bucket list. There is one more guy that I would have love to work with, but he had passed on before I got to Nashville, that was Roger Miller. He was a genius and a mentor in his own way to me. I wanted to try to be as good as him. Waylon Jennings one time said that people used to just follow the big guys. He and Willie used to just follow Roger around town.