Toby Keith w/ Special Guest Trace Adkins

TOBY KEITH

There's nothing any more remarkable about Toby Keith's thirteenth studio album than his twelfth. Or his tenth. Or his self-titled 1993 debut. As he's done for the last 16 years, Keith has gone to work playing the shows, writing the songs and recording the album that, in this case, became American Ride. Like the hard-working fans who buy his music and the soldiers he visits every year on his USO Tours, he takes his job seriously, gives it his all, gets up the next day and does it all over again. Of course, Toby Keith just happens to be doing it at the highest levels of entertainment industry success.

In fact, Keith's career is a model of consistency – and consistent excellence – that's arguably unrivaled in all genres of music. His 1993 debut was a No. 1 Billboard Heatseeker. His next four albums all reached at least top 10 on the Country Albums chart. Every album since, starting in 2001 with Pull My Chain, has reached No. 1. On the singles charts, he's scored a #1 hit every year since 1993. Across 44 single releases and 20 album releases including four hits collections, he's only released six singles he didn't write.

Every year, year-in and year-out, since 1993, Toby Keith has shown up at the very top of country music. And with American Ride, his 16th studio album, he's done it again.

"It's the same as always," Keith says of the album making process. "I do most of my writing on the road while I'm touring. As usual, I'll have guys out to write with. Most of this stuff was written either by myself or with Bobby Pinson. And each year it's my new crop. I'm probably 10 or 12 songs into writing for the next one. What we wrote last year ended up on this album, and what we're writing this year will go on the next one. We put the best 12 or so down in the studio and move on."

And it is that matter-of-fact routine that is so extraordinary. American Ride's title track is already a No. 1 smash, rising faster than any Keith release since 2001's "Courtesy of the Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)." Like "Courtesy," "American Ride" has tapped the collective consciousness of a nation in distress, this time providing music fans with a wry rallying cry. Unlike the 2001 hit, "Ride" was not written by Keith, though it sounds like it could have been.

"That's the secret," he says. "Over 16 years I've only released a handful of singles that weren't mine, but I think all of them were songs people were sure I wrote. And that's the only way I'll record something from the outside. I wouldn't do something that didn't sound like me as an artist."

Keith's songwriting is anything but in retrograde, however. He collaborates with Pinson on the smoldering "Are You Feelin' Me" and barely restrained "You Can't Read My Mind." The two cook up a little honkytonk fun with "Every Dog Has Its Day" (with John Waples), the grin-inducing "If I Had One" and the full-throttle "Loaded." And he still writes alone, offering up the confessional "Woke Up On My Own" and dialing up the romance on "Tender As I Want To Be."

His only allusion to the effort devoted to sustaining such a successful career comes on the Pinson collaboration "Gypsy Driftin'." "It can be tough beating it up on the road this long, going onstage when you're tired or sick," Keith says. "But as soon as you step out there the fans wave their flames and sing along with every song and it makes it all better. So that song's kind of a tip-of-the-hat to the people who've supported us all these years."

The straight-up Memphis blues of "If You're Tryin' You Ain't" offers a change of pace from Keith's previous work. "I was in the Oklahoma University locker room at halftime of a football game and saw four or five boys getting taped up," Keith recalls. "There's a guy there who keeps a handful of rolls of tape on his belt. I said, 'Are you tryin' to get everybody healthy?' And he said, 'If you're tryin', you ain't.'"

Another solo Keith composition, "The Ballad of Balad," was inspired by one of the Oklahoman's annual USO Tours to forward operating bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We were landing at this FOB called Balad and I asked if it was pronounced 'ballad' or 'buh-lodd.' They said it was 'buh-lodd' and I decided to write a song called 'The Ballad of Balad' about an Army recruiter talking to a slacker. I started playing it on the USO Tour last year and it was the hit of the parade."

American Ride's emotional center is "Cryin' For Me (Wayman's Song)," which Keith wrote for the funeral of his close friend Wayman Tisdale. An All-American basketball player at Oklahoma, first round NBA draft pick and 12-year player, Tisdale went on to have a very successful career as a renowned jazz bass player. "Great big charismatic smile," Toby says. "He didn't have a wall up, he was just one of the good guys."

Tisdale lost a leg to bone cancer in 2008 and struggled through leukemia, finishing his last rounds of chemo and tests early in 2009. "He called me in May on a Wednesday and left a voicemail asking if he could lease a couple buses from me," Toby says of his friend. "He had a clean bill of health and was ready to start playing dates again. I called him back Thursday and left a message telling him he could just use them. I wasn't on the road. The next morning I was doing phoners for my European tour that's coming up and got a text from my wife that said Wayman died. And I thought, no, he's been sick but he didn't die.

"Come to find out, he'd been having complications breathing. The chemo caused his throat to tighten down, his wife drove him to the hospital, they laid him down and looked at him and he died right there. Just 44-years old and one of the greatest guys. I wheeled around the house Friday and Saturday in a stupor. All I wanted to do was sleep. I got up Sunday morning, went into my office, shut the door, called his cell phone and heard his voicemail one more time. Then I picked up my guitar and wrote this song."

"I've had some loss in my life, of course my dad, but that's different," Keith continues. "I've lost some friends and acquaintances along the way, but this one for some reason was very difficult for me. The funeral was the next Wednesday and I wrote this for it, but I could not get through it. I ended up doing Willie's 'Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground' because I wasn't attached to that. It was weeks before I could make it all the way through the song. It was tough on me."

Keith met sax player Dave Koz, bass player Marcus Miller and percussionist Arthur Thompson at the funeral, and they agreed to play on the track for the album. "I brought my buddy Mark Wright to produce it because I didn't know who was going to play on it after we had it tracked." Keith produced the rest of American Ride, as he's done with all of his albums since 2006.

"This album is just another example of exactly what I do," Keith says, "The Wayman song has a jazz vibe to it and is a bit of a step out. 'Balad' is another bus song, and I haven't put one of those on an album in a few years. And the blues song 'Tryin'' is different for me. But I don't set out to do certain things with an album; however and whenever the inspiration strikes, I just go with it." And as Toby Keith goes, so goes country music. At least since 1993.

He's sold more than 30 million albums, been among the top all-genre touring artists for a decade and his songs have been honored by BMI for 63 million broadcast performances and counting. He notes, "That's the one number of them all that gets me."

Toby Keith is country music's most durable current hitmaker, and you can count it like clockwork. "I don't have to pinch myself, I know how hard I work," he says of the success. "And I expect when you work hard you'll have results." And these results speak for themselves.


TRACE ADKINS

Since he showed up in the country music world in 1996, Trace Adkins has been a relatively quiet but absolutely undeniable force in country music. At times his career has seemed to be almost under the radar. But with strong, memorable foundational hits plus subsequent #1 singles like 2006's "Ladies Love Country Boys" and 2007's "You're Gonna Miss This," Adkins, with minimal fanfare but a considerable range of triple-strength music, has evolved into a bona fide country music superstar.

When speaking of his fans, Adkins says there are "Badonkadonk people" and then there are "'Every Light in the House' people." The first group, named for Adkins' 2005 monster hit "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk," respond most readily to his songs that are big, bold, witty, fun -- the kind of high-impact, scrupulously well done productions that immediately, within their opening bars, announce themselves as modern country music extravaganzas.

The second group are more likely to rally around Adkins' first top-five hit, from 'Dreamin' Out Loud', his platinum-selling 1996 Capitol Nashville debut. These people love the way a song can more deliberately present itself over the course of three-and-a-half intense minutes soaked in the stylistic verities of country music traditions. But Badonkadonk people and Every Light people usually get along fine: With his commanding voice singing everything into a compelling whole, Adkins has no trouble seeing to that.

At 46, Adkins remains the same guy from Sarepta, Louisiana who, after singing in a gospel group and attending college and working on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, moved to Nashville in the 1990s and eventually made a name for himself in the country music business with that memorable '96 debut. There is no question, though, that since 2008, when he appeared as a contestant on NBC's 'The Celebrity Apprentice' and wound up one of two finalists, Adkins and his music have become more widely known.

"I'm glad now that I did it," he says of his appearances on 'The Celebrity Apprentice.' "I went into it reluctantly. The only reason I did it was because of the food allergy situation, and because that's such a personal cause for my family." He is referring to how he chose The Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network to receive any winnings of his from the show, and how his 6-year-old daughter is one of the millions of children and adults who must contend daily with potentially life-threatening food allergies. "The last gasp of every entertainer whose career is in the crapper is to do reality TV, and I certainly didn't want my appearance there to be viewed that way. But, happily, it hasn't turned out be like that."

In late 2007 Adkins released the second best-of collection of his career, following 2002's 'Greatest Hits Collection, Volume 1.' It was entitled 'American Man: Greatest Hits Volume II.' Where the first set featured smashes like "I'm Tryin' (2001) and other songs that had come after his #1 masterstroke of groove and grit "(This Ain't) No Thinkin' Thing,' (1996). 'American Man' featured songs for the Badonkadonk people and the Every Light people like 2002's "Chrome," not to mention the "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" lollapalooza itself. The set also featured 2005's "Arlington," which moved Adkins into the realm of current events and history.

Also in late 2007, Adkins wrote a book. "A Personal Stand: Observations and Opinions from a Freethinking Roughneck," it was called. Although he spelled out his political-social views, the book made sense for Adkins, an artist-entertainer who says he "abhors" show business "soapboxes."

"I've just got this pet peeve about artists in general," he says, "whether they be actors or writers, painters, singers, whatever, who think that because of what they do that they're more enlightened in some sense, that they're more in touch with that deeper spiritual side than everybody else. I resent that. I don't agree with it. I think that it is a pious attitude. I don't like to go to a concert and hear someone get up there and preach his or her political opinions. It's not what I came for. If you want to do that, write a book." So Adkins did just that.

After all of this, Adkins returned to the music – the very thing that communicated, along with his concerts, all the articulate passion and views and charisma, whether they were specifically on the table for millions of listeners or not -- that made him Trace Adkins, country star, to start with. He has recorded a new collection of songs. X, his tenth album, does indeed collect songs for the Badonkadonk people and the Every Light people. These are songs like "Sweet," which turns a common national expression into a tight and particularized country tune, and "I Can't Out Run You," a vocal tour de force about the weight of romantic obsession in which Adkins records a haunting country soul song, in 2008, Sinatra-style.

"I'm not afraid to do stuff like that," Adkins says of the song, "and we've done stuff like that live, we've just never recorded that starkly. I told Frank that on this one I wanted the vocal to do the work, and carry the entire load, that's the way I want to cut this and put my voice out there and let the chips fall where they may."

It is the highlight of a collection teeming with other highs. There is “Hillbilly Rich,” a brilliantly fun song about how country stars live it up materially like rap stars, but with perhaps less blinding bling, and there are gospel- and bluegrass-sired songs such Adkins' 2008 "Muddy Water" single, as well as "Sometimes a Man Takes a Drink." These songs show how both sides of Adkins' music work with a great stylistic co-cooperation: “Hillbilly Rich” wouldn't be nearly as good without the rooted center of Adkins' steady, nuanced baritone, and “Sometimes a Man Takes a Drink” could be tradition merely without his ability to infuse heritage styles with modern tensions and vibes. And the album features as well a song like "Till The Last Shot’s Fired," which looks at military history and personal sacrifice and in which Adkins' vocal is augmented by the rare presence of the West Point Glee Club. "We had to go all the way to the Pentagon," Adkins says, "to get permission to record with them." An energetic tune built around a heavy guitar lick -- Adkins introduces the song as "a little funkabilly" -- called "Better Than I Thought It'd Be" and a thoughtful orchestrated ballad, "All I Ask For Anymore," round out the album.

When he travels these days, Adkins says, he gets recognized more than he used to be before he performed so well on 'The Celebrity Apprentice'. Along with the consistent accumulation of his signature music over the years, Adkins' television appearances have further revealed him as the smart, articulate singer his recordings have always indicated that he is. Of course, the “Badonkadonk” people and the “Every Light” people already knew.

What’s clear now, though, is that a dozen years into his career, Trace Adkins is not just an undeniable country music force. With his larger-than-life personality, steely determination and proven ability to compete in other medias, he’s a force that will continue to come.