Definition – our need to explain ourselves and the world around us – is one of the most primal human forces. It's at the core of man's greatest quests. It powers his ambitions. It colors his art. Those with an obvious gift for expressing those definitions can themselves become objects for framing, and that's certainly the case for Toby Keith. The irony in his case, however, is that for an artist whose work continues to grow in depth, complexity and nuance, the casual descriptions too often tend toward the simplistic. But when the hastily applied veneer of a sound-byte media culture is stripped away, the almost overwhelming reality of his musical body of work looms into view. Never more so than in its most recent iteration.
Bullets In The Gun, Keith's 15th studio album, is a defining career milestone. But then, so have been each of his previous releases. And that's the real point. Any attempt to explain, qualify or quantify Toby Keith that doesn't start and end with the full breadth of his music is radically misdirected. For it is in his music – the art and craft of it and, just as significantly, the unwavering embrace of the audience – that we can best define a songwriter/performer now in his 18th consecutive year at the top of the charts.
Appropriately, Bullets helps bring everything that has come before into clearer relief. Rarely credited for the adventurousness and diversity of his catalog, Keith has created his most astoundingly varied collection of songs and sounds yet. And as it always has for Toby, the process begins in the writing.
"For years, I'd carry around those little recorders," Keith says, explaining how Bullets came to comprise, arguably, the deepest group of songs he's yet written. "At first they had little tapes, then they went digital. The problem was that I didn't have it with me all the time. Now I've got a recording app on my phone – and I've always got my phone – so I don't lose a single idea. Not one. Normally when I set out to write I have two or three or ideas. Last writing session, I had 40."
To put that in perspective, consider that Keith's time-worn system had yielded a succession of No. 1 albums from which he enjoyed at least one top 5 or better hit every year, beginning with his first single, "Should've Been A Cowboy" in 1993. "The process changed and more was brought to the table," he says. "In years past, I just lived off the results of what I had. If it was good, it was good. If it didn't work, I just moved on to the next album."
An already successful approach, now amplified, has yielded greater results on a number of levels. "It actually causes me to write more by myself," Keith says. "I've probably written four songs solo in the last few months and I would probably have written one without it. Two of those made the album and one I held off to be a single on the next album because I didn't want to lose it. The fourth song's been written since the album's been done and is as good a song as I've ever written in my life."
Elevated writing sessions led to more difficult decisions in the studio. "When you get to the end of a recording session with 12 or 13 songs cut, you know something's going on when you've got too many singles," he admits. "I picked the first single, the second single and figured two more will fight to be the third. But then I had two more songs that were definitely singles, and they were just going to get lost on this album."
Keith makes no apologies for making sure potential singles have a shot at airplay. "People don't buy enough albums these days, off of me or anybody, to justify putting seven singles on an album," he says. "You can't get to them all before the next album comes along. So I pulled off a couple of obvious singles because I wanted them to have a chance at radio. At the same time, there are great what I call 'listener songs' that aren't necessarily singles.
"For example, 'Bullets In The Gun' was four minutes long. I knew it was a great song and great title cut, but I figured it was too long and would never be a single. So I put it on the album. Well, we're on tour and opening the show with 'Bullets,' but now we've got radio calling my label and asking for it as a single. So we went back into the studio to see if we could shorten the song to three or three-and-a-half minutes. Now it looks like that will be a single and knock out one of the others I'd planned."
The final sequence also highlights Keith's long-standing gifts as a producer. Perhaps his greatest unheralded strength in this area is in surrounding himself with supremely talented creative minds and inspiring them to exceed themselves. "I don't bring demos into the studio unless I've got a song by someone else," Keith says. "But if it's a song I wrote or co-wrote, they're just going to get me sitting down with a guitar. That way we have to start from scratch and everybody has to be creative.
"If you bring in a demo it poisons the room; the influence is impossible to escape. I'd rather have a guy hear just the vocal and guitar and start thinking of different directions they could go with their parts. This time, for the first time, it even got me writing a guitar lick. 'Think About You All The Time' has a sort of goofy recurring riff that I played as I was demoing the song for the studio band. The second I played it the guys said, 'Well, we gotta put that lick in there.' So they were even influenced by my sh-tty guitar playing."What ultimately emerged from the recording process are melodies, arrangements and sounds that are not only unlike anything Keith has ever recorded, but also stand apart from his contemporaries. "The songs guided us down other those paths, more so than any intentional efforts in production," he says. "'Somewhere Else' is going to be a single and there won't be a another song on the radio that sounds like it. 'Trailerhood' is a single right now and sounds like nothing else. I've never done anything like 'Bullets In The Gun.'"
In fact, the title track is cinematic to the point of almost serving as its own video. "Somewhere Else" boasts Keith's craftiest word play in the context of a vocal performance unlike anything he's previously recorded. First single "Trailerhood," a Keith-only composition, was immediately recognized by radio and fans as a completely fresh sound. The nostalgic power of "Kissin' In The Rain" is set against a stirring emotional vulnerability that has also been one of Keith's hallmarks. His first-ever trucker song "Drive It On Home" adds a new flavor to his catalog. And closer "Get Outta My Car" is delivered with a wink that reminds the listener that despite the larger-than-life aura he can project, more often than not Keith aims his jabs squarely at himself.
Easily overlooked by those with preconceived notions, the innate talent, highly developed craftsmanship and undeniable intelligence Keith brings to bear on each successive album are readily apparent to the committed listener. "A lot of that's coming from getting older and more mature," he says. "You should get better at it. You shouldn't digress, you should progress."
Plenty of artists get older and more mature, but few if any in the history of popular recording can boast an 18-year career without an extended absence from the top of the charts. "I think a lot of artists get comfortable in their little groove and they just stay there and wonder why the world kind of passes them by," Keith says. "Complacency is really easy when you're successful. That's why it's difficult to come back with a second and third album. An act will spend their whole life hungry and driving that big train to the top, cram everything they have on their first album and throw it out there. Then 12 to 18 months later they've got to make another one and it's a big letdown."
Looking back, Keith admits that could have been him. "My second album, even though it went gold, didn't sell but half as many as the first one. I knew right then that the volume had to be turned up. By the time I got to the Blue Moon and Dream Walkin' albums, I couldn't just write 15 songs. I had to write 50. I had to have more to pick from, cut more of them and be more selective. After that, I made sure each year that I put in the time. You've got to keep growing and getting better as a writer. That's how I've gotten to 70 million career airplay spins. You have to do the work it takes to be good enough to hang around this long."
"Once you get to this place, the competitive side starts saying, 'Okay, can you hold it?' Because there are no goals left for me. I've accomplished every single thing you can accomplish in this industry. So the only thing that's left is getting to 100 million spins as a songwriter. That's a mind-blowing number, but it's like looking up in the middle of your baseball career and realizing you're at 500 home runs before anybody else and the record's 755. So I'm thinking 755 is the first goal, but I really want to get to 800 and see if I've still got any gas in the tank.
"All that being said, do you think I'm going to get to 100 million and be happy? I know somebody's going to come along at some point in the next century and want to set their own benchmark. So that's in the back of my mind. Longevity and 100 million spins are the only two goals I have left because I don't answer to anybody anymore. I'm not dictated to by a record label. I went and created my own islands in the world so all I have to do is guard the shoreline."
Bullets helps define another of Keith's islands with its nod to his live performances, which have been selling out venues nationwide for more than a decade. The Deluxe Edition features four tracks from his spring 2010 "Incognito Bandito" club show. Lest anyone mistake him for a paint-by-numbers arena act, Keith flexes some serious musical bravado in making the concept a reality, and capturing it on record.
"The Banditos represent everything me and those session players got into this business for – love of music," he says. "I was in the studio, sitting around with Kenny Greenberg one day and asked him if any of those A-list studio cats get out to play live. One worked some with Mark Knopfler, another with somebody else. But when they go out they play those guys' songs, it's the same list every night and there might only be a handful they really dig. So I asked, 'What if I paid you guys good and we went out and played some high-profile bars? I'd have the best band in the world – all the A players on one stage.' I went around until I found a few who loved country blues and straight-up Memphis blues, and they were all completely into it.
"Now, this is a band that rehearsed in Nashville then met me at the Fillmore in New York. They set up, we ran through them quick as we could in a little sound check, then we got up in front of the world and said, 'Here we are.' New York press people were there and it was like, 'Well, if we f--- this up we'll get some press, alright.' But we just stepped out there, spit in the floor and took off. Afterward, we had to go through and find a few things that work on the record to give the fans a taste of the Banditos. So the choices weren't so much about which songs or artists we wanted to cover as much as it was, what one-take live recording is the most impressive?"
Carefully crafted from nearly two decades of experience or fearlessly captured in the moment, music is the measure for Keith. Which is why the descriptions he has most willingly accepted for himself over the years are, fittingly: Singer, songwriter and entertainer. Bullets In The Gun finds all three, and Toby Keith, in high definition.
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