While Toby Keith certainly knew how to put on a good performance, the artist’s real strength was his ability to write songs. It was a skill he honed over many years.
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In an Instagram video posted shortly before his death, Keith recalled working on his first song as a teenager. As they say, you never forget your first, and that’s certainly true of music as well.
Keith said, “The first song I ever wrote I was 14 or 15 years old. It was called if ‘You’re Handing Out a Heartache.’ It wasn’t bad. It was structured right, but it wasn’t very good either. But the people around here when I played it, they were like ‘Wow, that’s a great song.’ It’s just a song. That was 5,000 songs ago.”
Toby Keith on Songwriting
Keith would try out songs with his band to see if the material was worth keeping or ditching. It was a learning experience for the country singer to figure out what connected with audiences.
“I didn’t know how good my songs were when we started playing them out. I’d write them and we’d play them in that little circle of friends, but you didn’t know how good they were gonna be on a large scale,” Keith said via SongwriterUniverse Magazine. “The next step was to take it to a nightclub and you might sing eight or 10 that you thought were your best and they might not even get a reaction from the crowd.’
Keith said he ended up writing 50 songs just to find a good one in the bunch. It required putting a lot of thoughts down on the page.
‘Looking back on that time period, I can see where I would write 50 songs and I’d get one good one,” said Keith. “Then maybe I’d write 40 songs and write a good one. Then it would only be 30 songs with a good one, and the gap just kept getting closer and closer and finally got to where anything you wrote was a pretty decent song. It took about six to eight years to get to that point.’
Keith’s dedication paid off when he was inducted into the Songwriter Hall of Fame in 2015. As Keith once said, “I always felt like that the songwriting was the most important part of this whole industry.”
[Photo by Rick Kern/Getty Images for iHeartMedia]
