Success can be a tremendous distraction, certainly for the successful and, in many cases, for those who would try to tell their story. For a number of reasons, Toby Keith is a prime example of both, but in very different ways. Recently and again named country music's top-earning country star by Forbes, the Oklahoma-based entertainer receives tremendous notoriety for presiding over a vast and growing enterprise of sold-out tours, chart-topping albums and singles, a rapidly expanding restaurant chain, a signature beverage and more.

    At the same time, a small fraction of songs in his prolific catalog lead some to fervently politicize him despite a generally apolitical public stance. Whatever the causes, too often the descriptions applied to Toby Keith obscure the fundamental root of his success: Songwriting. Fortunately, time has a way of clearing those clouds, leaving hope that someday he will be known primarily and rightly as one of the finest popular songwriters of any era in any genre. That outcome is only possible, however, precisely because he has never lost that focus, never been distracted by the ups or the downs.

    When his career could barely be called that, Toby Keith wrote songs. Struggling with a former label and fighting to regain a grip on his career, he wrote songs. Peppered with unwarranted criticism, he wrote songs. Showered with praise and awards, he wrote songs. And in many ways, it all goes back to a woman named Clancy, a club she owned and a grandson whose teenage summers there sparked a flame that has yet to even flicker.

    The title track of Clancy's Tavern is almost a prequel to Toby's 2005 hit "Honkytonk U." "It's the same grandmother," he explains. "'Honkytonk U' talked about my mother putting me on a Greyhound and sending me to live with my grandmother for the summer, and how things took off from there. This one is more about the bar and what I saw there. The actual name of the place was Billy Garner's Supper Club, but her husband teased her and nicknamed her Clancy because she ran a tavern. Every line in the song is true. This isn't fiction."

    Like each album before it, Clancy's Tavern documents the continuing and seemingly inevitable growth of Keith's skills as singer and producer, certainly, but even more as a writer. Consider the songs you won't hear on Clancy's Tavern: "Blue Enough (To Break A Heart In Two)," "Another She Ain't You," "Didn't Forever Get Here Fast?" and "Rattle Can Red." Well, they're actually not songs, just bits and pieces of lyrics from an artist whose gift for language and melody is so well-developed, his songs beget ideas and phrases that in themselves could be fully formed songs.

    "That comes with writing your whole life if you stay after it," Toby says. "Sometimes when I write with guys who've been around longer than me they'll say, 'You're gonna have to give me a bit to get my chops up.' They might feel slow for the first day or two while they try to get in the groove. But I write all the time. I've never quit writing since I was 14 - haven't eased up one day. If I took off next year, stayed home and did nothing, I would still be writing."

    Call it discipline, passion, obsession or all three, but that consistency is perhaps the greatest not-so-secret key to Keith's multi-faceted success. It makes the tours, albums, and related endeavors possible. "If you were a homebuilder and looked at the houses you built when you were 20 and looked at the ones you build today, you'd see they were much better - even than ones you were building five or six years ago. As a songwriter, your system gets better. Your vocabulary gets bigger. Everything that would help a songwriter increases. Plus, you live longer and have more time to stumble on good ideas."

    Keith's creative process is well documented. In addition to his habit of recording song ideas on his phone, his co-writing efforts are ingrained in his annual schedule. "I have three or four guys I write with who come out on the road," he says. "There's an occasional person who comes once, but Rivers Rutherford usually comes out a couple weekends a year. Bobby Pinson and I are together probably 50 days a year. Scotty Emerick still comes around about two weekends and we do the two weeks together overseas on the USO Tour and have time to write there. Actually, 'Chillaxin' was written on a bus during a two-day stop in South Korea on our way to Afghanistan."

    Each year's batch routinely yields more songs than Keith can use. Three of Clancy's Tavern's cuts - "Club Zydeco Moon," "I Won't Let You Down" and "I Need To Hear A Country Song" - were written for 2010's Bullets In The Gun. Three songs from the 2011 writing sessions will appear on Keith's next album.

    "For the last decade, we've put out a single from a new album when we go on tour in the summer," Keith explains. "The album comes out in October, you get a couple more singles and we start over."

    Saying "we" is no self-conscious affectation coming from Keith's mouth. In fact, one of the more interesting paradoxes of his artistry is the extent to which he is the central creative force on all levels but also highly collaborative. His familiar family of co-writers are only part of the story. Longtime engineer Mills Logan is regularly referred to as "my ears in the studio." Session musicians including Kenny Greenberg, who is also the bandleader for Keith's Incognito Bandito club shows, are encouraged to contribute in a best-idea-wins environment. Even this album's sole outside cut is testament to this almost communal approach.

    "I don't remember who played it for me the first time, but it was so stupid I just died laughing," Toby says of "Red Solo Cup," which was written by Brett and Jim Beavers with Brad and Brett Warren. "What's great about this song is it does everybody the same way it did me: 'That's the stupidest song in the world and I can't get it out of my head.' I laugh every time I hear it. Sometimes it's good for the world to hear something like that.

    "When I decided to record it, I called up the Warren brothers and the Beaver brothers. They wrote it and this song is real typical of those knuckleheads. But I didn't want to make this song my version of what they wrote. I wanted to make them part of it - record their song with them. We brought them in when we cut it, to play and sing background, so it really sounds like them." Sure enough, every note on the track is courtesy of the four co-writers and Keith.

    Another indication of Keith's expansive mindset is the growing role of Bobby Pinson, who gets a "Wrangler-Producer" credit on Clancy's Tavern. "When we're tracking I'm always cutting the scratch vocal and all I hear is what's in my headset monitors. For years I've had Mills Logan behind the board and really relied on him, and he does a great job.

    "When I write with Bobby, he says to call him when I cut his song because he wants to be there. He does a lot of producing and he'll say, 'I don't want to step on your toes or anything, I just want to be your other ears in here.' I never mind a songwriter coming in. They were there when we wrote the song and want it to sound as good as I do. Scotty comes in when we cut one of his songs, and that kind of input really adds to it.

    "And if I write a song by myself, I'd usually cut it by myself. But Bobby was around so much that I started asking him what he thought sounded good on a song I wrote. He made a suggestion, we tried it and it didn't work. He suggested something else and it worked. He was in the control room on the talk back and I started firing ideas at him. He said he didn't want to produce the record or get any money for it, but he'd love to have some input when he's around. He may not show up every day, but days he's there he might run with it. It's pretty much two good friends beating and banging it out.

    "When we did the credits I didn't know how to label him. I know one thing: he's a good wrangler, because that's what he did with it. So that's how we came up with that."

    Even the album's chart-topping first single "Made In America" - wildly popular with fans and easily lumped into the jingoistic caricature by critics - reveals the unwavering honesty Keith brings to his music. "I've done so much patriotic stuff that I have people sending me and bringing me those kinds of ideas daily," he says. "And when I hear most of this stuff it's like, I've already done that. I've already done my warrior song - 'American Soldier.' I've already done my battle cry - 'Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue.' I've already done my fun uptempo - 'American Ride.' Then Bobby showed up here a couple summers ago and said he knows I get tired of hearing it, but he had one America idea he wanted to write.

    "We got to talking about how when we were kids, if your car broke down your dad could take a wrench, WD40, bailing wire and a screw driver and about fix it. We jumped on that, started writing. I just couldn't get past thinking that my old man was that old man." If the song rings true, regardless of the perceptions, Keith is compelled to let it lead. And that devotion to truth is also manifested in his live performances.

    Four songs from the 2010 Incognito Bandito show at New York's Fillmore are bundled with a deluxe edition of Clancy's Tavern. Again, Keith's honesty rears up: "He's courageous," bandleader Kenny Greenberg recently told a Nashville songwriter of the tracks. And the accomplished studio musician would certainly be one to know that one of the first rules of putting live music on record is to clean up the mistakes. But Keith wasn't having it.

    "People put so much work into an album to make it the best it can be, but we don't do jack to the Bandito stuff," Keith says. "We let them go exposed - no overdubs, no vocals, nothing. We take live tracks, Mills does a mix on them and we stick them on the album. That's exactly the way they sounded that night, except the mix is perfect."

    He trusts the performance, he certainly trusts the songs and, ultimately, he trusts the music. For those reasons and those reasons alone, Clancy's Tavern will be another in a long line of successes. And somewhere, Toby Keith, undistracted, is writing another song.

Toby Keith "Clancy's Tavern"
Cut by Cut

"Made In America" (Toby Keith, Bobby Pinson & Gregory Scott Reeves)
A couple of years ago, I was with a retail guy discussing how to manufacture clothes in the U.S. of A, opening some factories up that had been closed down. One of them was in my home state of Oklahoma. He was still trying to balance the delicate line of finding a retail price point where you can break even and sell American made clothes. At the time, Bobby Pinson was out on the road with me and said he had an idea for a song about simpler times, when you could still work on your vehicle with a Craftsman wrench, WD-40 and some bailing wire. And we wrote "Made In America." It says in the song: "my old man's that old man" and by God, my old man was that old man.

"I Need To Hear A Country Song" (Toby Keith, Rivers Rutherford & Bob Dipiero)
Rivers Rutherford brought this idea to me, one that he and Bob Dipiero had been throwing around. We ended up writing a little different version, but it had a great melody and was a great idea for a song. It's very well written, very well crafted and really country with a lot of word play. But the gist of the song is: when you really need to hear a country song you can't just turn the jukebox on. I want to "hear a loser cryin', songs about a love that's dyin', lyin', cheatin' to the bone. Three chords stone cold country song."

"Clancy's Tavern" (Toby Keith & Scotty Emerick)
My Grandmother passed away when she was 86; she was like Miss Kitty and ran a supper club/night club in Fort Smith for years. So when I was a kid, some of the earliest memories I have of being on this earth were going by her night club and seeing my Grandmother. I spent a whole summer with her, and years ago I wrote the song "Honkytonk U" about it and her buying me a guitar. This song is a tribute to her. The name of the bar was Billy Garners' Supper Club, but it wasn't fitting into my song very well. My Grandfather had nicknamed her Clancy because she was a saloon keeper, and always called her Clancy around the house. So I used Clancy's Tavern. I give you the visual and everything you see when you go in the door. There's nothing made up in this song. Every bit of this is word for word, exactly what you would have seen if you went in the front door at 5:00 and stayed all night long. It's a pretty special song to me.

"Trying To Fall In Love" (Toby Keith & Bobby Pinson)
Bobby came over one time and said, 'I wrote a song today that you ought to cut,' and I knew the song he was talking about, it was a hit. I started strumming it with a little different groove and had this real cool little acoustic sound going on, and I spit a bunch of words out. In about 30 seconds I had this, "if women come a dime a dozen I ain't got a penny. Some guys are getting' way too much, some guys don't get any. But if I had a nickel for every time I'd had enough, I'd still be busted and heart broken still be tryin' to fall in love." It's really up tempo, traditional, fun country song. Then we put some verses to it and screwed it down. It's one of my favorite things on the album.

"Just Another Sundown" (Toby Keith & Bobby Pinson)
"Just Another Sundown" is a classic country radio song. It's old-fashioned. I guess I get it from listening to The Roadhouse so much on XM Sirius Radio in my vehicles. But the song is very simply written, a very classic melody. Guys, hey it's "just another sundown, just another bar stool, just another place where a fool can find another fool," sad night in the world, sad night in the club.

"Beers Ago" (Toby Keith & Bobby Pinson)
"Beers Ago" is up tempo fun. Talk about word play; it's a freaking word salad. It flies by very fast and has a lot of catchy phrases. It was difficult in the studio to sing the first time because it's just so complicated to get all of the rhymes to fall inside the meter of the song. It's about a guy that leaves town when he turns 18 years old and figures out that maybe I should go back but maybe not. Can't ever really go home. But all those memories I have are "fifteen hundred and sixty two beers ago."

"South Of You"(Toby Keith & Eddy Raven)
Eddy has come out here several times on the road and written several songs with me. We've had a lot of fun and written some really, really good songs. "South of You" was an idea that he had about getting on a boat and not knowing where I'm gonna' end up but it'll be "somewhere south of you." I jumped in the middle of it with him and we started saying: there's a lot of places I could go but eventually we end up living with peace of mind "somewhere south of you."

"Club Zydeco Moon" (Toby Keith & Eddy Raven)
Eddy's from Louisiana and knows all of the Cajun coon ass vibe lingo that goes on down there. So we started writing about a brothel where there's a head lady. The madam is named Mama Zue Zue and she brought this boy in that was a wayward soul. He had a wonderful evening that night, he thought, and he's still haunted by it 25 years later. It's got all of the Cajun gree-gree eyes and Mama Zue Zue, squeeze box and the candle light - all the supernatural stuff that tends to go on down in that world. It's really well crafted and I wanted to put it on the album because it's different than anything on the album.

"I Won't Let You Down" (Toby Keith)
I almost put this on the last album but I held it back because it was such a good ballad. It's one of my favorite things I have written by myself in the last couple years. I actually said one day in a conversation: "don't expect too much from me and I won't let you down," and I thought that it needed to be a song title. I wrote about two lonely rebels, a boy and a girl, finally falling in love. And the guy says: "I ain't got a pot of gold, I ain't even got a rainbow, but I've heard that love is where treasure can be found, don't expect too much from me and I won't let you down." Kind of a first take for the two rebels who let their hearts go.

"Red Solo Cup" (Jim Beavers, Brett Beavers, Brad Warren & Brett Warren)
This song was sent to me by the Warren Brothers and the Beaver Brothers, they call their band The Warren Beavers. It's a ridiculous, fun song. It's very stupid but it's very clever and very funny. And it's fun to sing with an infectious melody. I heard it and they said, "Man, you're probably the only guy in town who will do this." They're right and so I had to prove them right and cut the song. We did a video; it's outrageous. The song is basically a bunch of frat party people getting hammered, drinking out of a red Solo cup and all the stupid stuff they do. They actually praise the red Solo cup for all the important things and usages that it has. You're going to find it really stupid but you'll be singing it the next day when you wake up.

"Chillaxin" (Toby Keith & Scotty Emerick)
Scotty and I were on a bus in South Korea; he has done all my USO tours with me. We were going from A to B, or B to C, wherever we were going. He had this idea and we wanted to write a little cool song called "Chillaxin.'" It's about finding a little piece of mind somewhere where I can just kick all the way back.

Deluxe Edition - Incognito Bandito
There will be a 'deluxe edition' of the album which will be a premium and have extra songs. It's hard to find a lot of material. So what I do is take my live recordings from The Fillmore in New York City with Incognito Bandito, my little side-bar band, and put them on the 'deluxe edition.' We did it the last album, and this time we've taken four more cuts and they're all at the end of the 'deluxe edition.' We recorded them live, there are no overdubs, no added harmony and no vocal tweaks. It's just raw, live footage with a good mix on it. You will hear us doing "Truck Drivin' Man," the old song by Buck Owens, "Shambala," by Three Dog Night, "Memphis," the old Johnny Rivers version, and "High Time" which is a Waylon song: "it's high time you quit your lowdown ways."