Toby Keith's 'Gun' Is Locked and Loaded
studio to chat about the new disc, songwriting and his band of Banditos. Toby also revealed a new, somewhat unlikely hobby, as well as the most fun thing he's ever done in his career.
It's been 17 years since 'Should've Been a Cowboy,' was a hit, and here you are, 15 albums later with 'Bullets in the Gun.' How do you feel your songwriting has evolved?
It's about the same as always. I write all year and when it comes time to make an album, I get my pile of songs together, put my session guys in the room, pick up an acoustic, start playing my songs and we start from scratch right there. Once in a while a song will straggle in from another year, but most of the time it's just songs that I wrote during the past season. That's my homegrown home-breds, and I run and race them. Those [songs] are my horses. Some years are gonna be better than others, but it's what I did last year and it's what I live with. The results are sometimes great and sometimes so-so, but I'm blessed with the career I have and that's the way I do it every year.
The title cut could certainly be made into a movie. What inspired it?
[Songwriter] Rivers Rutherford was on the road with me a year ago in Buffalo, and we were trying to figure out what are we going to do next. I said, "I haven't written a Western themed song in fifteen years; I want to do an attitude song where a drifter, instead of riding a horse, is riding a motorcycle and make it Western theme but bring to modern day time. In the name of love, this drifter in the matter of days meets his soul mate, and she's wilder and crazier and maybe even meaner than he is. And you tell what goes on. It happens fast. He's probably been drifting all over the world on his motorcycle for years and probably encounters all kinds of different relationships, but this one was different. He
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