Songoftheday 6/18/24 - We got winners we got losers, chain-smokers and boozers...
"I Love This Bar" - Toby Keith
from the album Shock'n Y'all (2003)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #26 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9
Today's song comes from Toby Keith, who went from being a consistent country music hitmaker to jingoistic provocateur with his Unleashed album in 2002, which spun off a quartet of hit country singles, three of which made the top-40 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 with "Courtesy Of The Red White & Blue", "Who's Your Daddy", and the lynching-glorifying "Beer For My Horses". A year later, Toby returned with his eighth studio album and fourth on DreamWorks Records, Shock'n Y'All, titled to appeal to the "bomb them to infinity" crowd. The lead single for the record, though (probably tempered by the record company to be more wide-appealing) was the easy-going party record "I Love This Bar". Written by Keith with Scotty Emerick, the song goes through the various characters that are in that particular bar that night. And there's nothing controversial in any of the verses (the nod-wink to "the veterans talk about their battle scars". The production from James Stroud with Keith is set to fit in with the beach cantina vibe Alan Jackson, Kenny Chesney, and of course Jimmy Buffett were riding on. The music video again tried to go for the comic side of Keith with usually works, but the slipped in transphobic sub-sub-plot wasn't a good choice at all...
"I Love This Bar" returned Toby to the top-40 on Billboard's Hot 100 in November of 2003, while topping the Country Songs airplay chart for five weeks. The Shock'n Y'all album, released in November as the single was cresting spent a week at #1 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and thirteen weeks atop the Country Albums list, going on to sell over four million copies.
Both Toby and the album will be back to the series.
(6/10)
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Up tomorrow: Atlanta rap duo delivers the second exclamation of their one-two punch.
Comments