For Toby Keith, making albums is a lot like raising horses, The Columbian of Vancouver, Wash., reports. He’s built a track record of coming up with a few singles on each album that tend to race up the charts like a thoroughbred charging to the finish line.“You can go to Kingsland, Ky., go to the Kingsland sale, and you can handpick the top yearlings in the sale that really look athletic,” Toby says. And if you buy 10 really nice athletic horses, one or two or three of them are really going to run good.”

Music works the same way, Toby says. “Whatever I wrote last year is what I record, and I have to live with that,” he says. “I don’t really go in thinking I’m going to stretch myself this way or I’ve got this kind of theme going or I want to use acoustics all the way through. I just look at each song and say, ‘Here’s what instrumentation I want on this song,’ and I bring the guys in and we put the magic dust on it.”

Toby’s new CD, Big Dog Daddy, is continuing the trend, with the first single, “High Maintenance Woman” reaching the Top 10. A second single, “Love Me If You Can,” has just cracked the Top 20 on the country singles chart and is looking like it’s in for a nice run.

~Courtesy of GAC.com Country Music Photo Gallery