Songoftheday 2/9/23 - We talk about your work how your boss is a jerk, we talk about your church and your head when it hurts...

 

 

"I Wanna Talk About Me" - Toby Keith

from the album Pull My Chain (2001)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #28 (three weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 7

 

Today's song comes from country music star Toby Keith, whose sixth studio album Pull My Chain had already scored a top-40 crossover hit on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart with "I'm Just Talkin' About Tonight" in the autumn of 2001. Toby's next single from the record was the light comical relationship fare of "I Wanna Talk About Me". Written by Bobby Braddock, the song is distinctive from its rivals at the time by the verses being fast-paced spoken word to the beat, which had people declaring it "country rap". The thing is, country music has had a long tradition of spoken-word songs dating long long before the appearance of the later genre, from Bill Anderson's "Still" to Jerry Reed's "She's Got The Goldmine (And I Got The Shaft)", the latter a good comparison to this new song, as Keith delivers a hilarious rant about how he listened to his lady's missives about her life, but admitting he'd like to have a word in edgewise. In another man's hands, this could've been a disaster (this was originally pitched to Blake Shelton, which would've been a nightmare for a young new artist), but to his credit Toby sells this with an affable snark that made this possibly his best of his many attempts at this lighter side of his work. Coupled with a punchy music video, and Keith found his momentum going up...

"I Wanna Talk About Me" became the second top-40 crossover hit, and second #1 country radio hit, from Pull My Chain in December of 2001. Toby and the Pull My Chain album will return to the series.

(8/10)

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Here's Keith performing the song at the American Music Awards in 2001...

Up tomorrow: Colombian songstress goes blonde and aims for the pop market with no restrictions.