Jamey Johnson Credits Toby Keith’s Passing for Inspiring New Music

Jamey Johnson will be releasing his first new album of original music in 14 years when Midnight Gasoline is unveiled on November 8th. After many years and many excuses for not releasing a new album—including a concussion, publisher issues, and just plain apathy—Johnson has experienced a creative explosion recently, recording some 30 songs total at the Cash Cabin Studios, including a dozen for the new album.

Jamey Johnson never stopped writing new songs entirely, but he did seem much less interested in the endeavor for well over a decade, and after he won two CMA Song of the Year awards in 2007 and 2009 as one of the most acclaimed songwriters in the business. So what changed recently? In a recent interview with Billboard, Johnson spoke specifically how significant Toby Keith’s death was to inspiring the new album.

“The writing was already coming back to me, piece by piece, but I still didn’t have any ambitions on making a record,” Johnson explains. “When Toby passed away, it moved everything into high gear because I realized that that was the end of his discography, that we weren’t getting another Toby Keith record. And that’s what drove me to wanting to finish my own discography. It’s what made me understand that I’m nowhere near done, and so it’s time to get busy. After he passed away, I immediately started talking about this session and started trying to get all the particulars in order. It was time for me to get in the studio again.”

Jamey Johnson also revealed in the interview that he’d been writing with Toby Keith recently, and that there’s probably a trove of Toby Keith co-writes still out there waiting to be recorded and released from others. Along with being one of the most popular country artists in the ’00s, Toby Keith was a prolific songwriter, writing most of his own hits.

“We were working on a song toward the end,” Jamey Johnson says. “I called him up one night and shared a few lines with him, and he added a few lines and we turned around and wrote this whole verse. We laughed a bunch, and it was one of those that I thought, ‘This is great. There’s gonna come a time I’ll get out to Oklahoma or maybe he and I will meet up somewhere at a golf tournament, but we’ll have some time sit down and finish this thing up.‘”

Johnson never got that opportunity. He says that Toby Keith always seemed to believe he would pull through the stomach Cancer that eventually took his life. That is why it came as such a shock to the country music community when Keith passed away on February 5th.

Toby Keith left behind an rather incredible, multi-decade legacy of songs and albums that recently landed him into the Country Music Hall of Fame posthumously. After taking 14 years off, Jamey Johnson doesn’t have a similar catalog. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t make up for lost time. He’ll try to add to his impressive catalog with Midnight Gasoline.