Trivia / Toby Keith

• Black Sheep Hit: "Red Solo Cup" is his most popular crossover hit. It's an acoustic novelty song, and one of the very few singles of his career that he did not write.
• Career Resurrection: He managed to have two. The first came after he moved from Mercury to DreamWorks, when his second single for the latter label ("How Do You Like Me Now?!") became the biggest country hit of 2000 and led to a hot streak that carried him well into the first half of the decade. He cooled off considerably upon moving to Show Dog, but had a minor resurgence in late 2011-early 2012 with the viral hit "Red Solo Cup".
• Chart Displacement: A lot of his #1 hits have long been forgotten, but averted overall as "How Do You Like Me Now?!" and "Beer for My Horses" are among his most iconic songs. Meanwhile, "Red Solo Cup" zig-zags this as it only got to #9 on the country charts but is his biggest Hot 100 entry at #15.
• Creator Backlash: Toward "Upstairs Downtown" (he told Billboard that he didn't think it had potential as a single and would have preferred "Boomtown"), his duet with Sting on a cover of the latter's "I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying" (a move that he felt was selling out), and "Red Solo Cup" (he considered it Cool, but Stupid).
• Development Hell: His 2015 album 35 MPH Town was delayed at least twice due to underperformance of its singles ("Drunk Americans" and the title track), and the followup has also stalled out due to "A Few More Cowboys" barely denting the charts.
• Enforced Method Acting: He was sick the day he recorded "Don't Let the Old Man In" for the Clint Eastwood movie The Mule, giving the song a raspy, weathered delivery that fit the song's tone.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Near the end of his tenure with Mercury, he was working on a new album, but label execs didn't like it. They chose only two songs off the would-be album, "Getcha Some" and "If a Man Answers", released both as singles off a Greatest Hits Album, and asked him to try again. When they didn't like the next two songs that he sent, either, Toby demanded out of his contract and took said songs to DreamWorks Records. That label launched him with "When Love Fades", but when it bombed, he asked that it be pulled and replaced with a song that Mercury had rejected titled "How Do You Like Me Now?!" — a good move on his part, as that song was a six-week #1 smash, his first Top 40 pop hit, and the biggest country hit of 2000.
  • A self-inflicted example since the move to Show Dog. He was usually pulling singles at the 15-week mark, regardless of how high they are on the charts, just to ensure he always puts out one album a year. This pretty much torpedoed his Bullets in the Gun album. The revolving door finally stopped with Drinks After Work, which he gave some more breathing room on either side.
• He Also Did: While very rare, Toby has had a couple outside cuts: "Slave to the Habit" by Shane Minor and "Starkissed" by Cledus T. Judd. He also co-produced some albums by other acts on the Show Dog roster.
• Popularity Redo: Toby had originally released "Does That Blue Moon Ever Shine on You" independently in The '80s before redoing it for Blue Moon.
• Reality Subtext: "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)" is so very, very obviously tied to the era immediately after 9/11.
• Referenced by...: Jessica Andrews' 2002 single "There's More to Me Than You": "Like Toby said, how do you like me now?"
• Sleeper Hit: "How Do You Like Me Now?!" had a very slow start on the charts, but once 1999 flipped to 2000, it began picking up steam.
• Troubled Production: His third album Blue Moon was a minor example: one album prior, Mercury Records had moved him to the newly-created Polydor Nashville imprint. However, Polydor Nashville was struggling due to a lack of strong leadership and a surplus of new labels in the market at the time. The company tried renaming the label A&M Nashville in early 1996, but after the label heads quit, the A&M roster was folded back into Mercury. This resulted in nearly the entire roster disappearing from the music scene (except for Keith and Chely Wright), and each single off Blue Moon being distributed by a different label.
• What Could Have Been:
  • "I Wanna Talk About Me" was originally planned to be Blake Shelton's debut single, but his label thought that it was too extreme for a debut single.
  • "Clancy's Tavern" was originally going to be the second single from that album, but stations started playing "Red Solo Cup" instead.