Album Review: 35 MPH Town by Toby Keith

Now into his third decade of releasing music, Toby Keith has been there, done that and he most certainly has the t-shirt. 

One of the shrewdest businessmen in the country music industry (and, because of that, one of the richest, too), Keith has parlayed an ability to write engaging songs, some of them straight-ahead serious social commentaries about America and the world in this day and age, and others light-hearted fare, into a long career in Nashville. The man has more #1 singles and albums than you can poke a stick at.

Even so, there’ve been signs in recent years that his traditional-leaning style of country music isn’t cutting the mustard in the face of how the genre is transforming, and now embracing – if not by everyone in Nashville – the bro-country genre popularised by Florida Georgia Line and Luke Bryan, and the rap, dance and hard rock elements that come along with it.

With modern country music moving away from traditional the old-school country that Keith favours, it’s fair to say that his most recent albums haven’t done anywhere near as well as those he released at the end of the last decade, and country radio hasn’t been kind to two singles already released from his 2015 offering, 35 MPH Town.

Despite that, if you’re a fan of the Oklahoman, then you’re pretty much guaranteed to love the new album. After all, it’s everything that you could want, and more, from a Toby Keith release: a few boozy drinking songs – ‘Rum is the Reason’ and ‘Every Time I Drink, I Fall In Love – a couple that are the rowdy semi-rock tunes that remind you of the power of Keith’s voice – ‘Good Gets Here’, which is, at the moment, my favourite song from the album – and, of course, the message songs.

What would a Toby Keith album be without a message song or three? Remember ‘Courtesy of the Red White and Blue’? Or ‘American Ride’? Classics. There’s a few good ones on 35 MPH Town, too. The title track is a commentary on the shifting social norms, and it doesn’t take long for you to get the idea that Keith hates it. The waltzy ballad ‘Drunk Americans’, the first single released nearly a year ago, suggests that people should forget their various allegiances – political, social and otherwise – in favour of getting drunk together and having fun with it.

Overall, the ten-track spread is stronger than 2013’s Drinks After Work (which peaked, disappointingly, at seven on the US charts), but there’s no guarantee that Keith’s new album – on which he co-wrote every track, bar ‘Drunk Americans’ and produced for his own Showdog-Universal Music label – will get anywhere near as much publicity as it deserves.