Anatomy of a Career: The Catalog of Toby Keith : BOOMTOWN

Or, how the avoid the sophomore slump with four Top 10 hits and a Platinum certification while showcasing personality and artistry.

An oft-told cliché in the music business is that an artist has their entire life to write their first album but only a few months to make their second one, especially if the artist cannot or does not write songs while out on tour. And, as such, this is why second albums rarely “live up to” the success of a first album. This cliché is also known as the “sophomore slump,” a phenomenon not relegated to musicians as it’s something athletes, actors and filmmakers also fall prey to. Toby Keith, thankfully, came prepared with both a deep songbook and a keen sense of himself for his second album Boomtown. The record, released for a new record label within the Mercury family called Polydor (and the beginning of an odyssey for Toby Keith where he’d record one-off records for a cavalcade of Mercury-affiliated labels that were here today, gone tomorrow). Through it all, Toby’s hitmaking career started to thrive on his sophomore album.

Three of the album’s four singles hit the country chart’s Top 10 with the fourth, “Big Ol’ Truck” scoring a Top 15 finish but just like with his first album, Toby Keith, this album found Toby Keith delivering a more consistent product with the album cuts (three of which were written by someone other than Toby Keith), dig deeper and three of the tunes were written by Toby Keith himself, including the album’s title track and the lead-off single and his second #1 hit, “Who’s That Man.” On the surface, “Who’s That Man” is a song about a man whose old life has been taken over by another man and indeed the song may actually be about that topic but “Who’s That Man” actually could be — in 2025 context — be seen as a man wondering why he’s going through the motions. He has everything he wants out of his life yet he’s not satisfied enough to be happy about it. It’s a new take on this song for me and, y‘know, the song has taken on this latter meeting to me as an older man well aware of how fast life passes by and how much time we spend in autopilot. This idea certainly makes the song very “deep” for a modern country song (especially a mid-1990’s one) but, hey, Toby Keith is definitely deeper a thinker than often given credit for.

While country music’s more recent past seems to be all about tailgates, tan lines and and bench seats, Toby Keith shows that these songs were always around, except in “Big Ol’ Truck,” Toby is singing about a stunning women with a stunning truck who only makes him love him more. It has red step sides, bucket seats and a radio full of Haggard songs blasting through the speakers. It’s all a rollicking good time and a nice antidote to many serious songs from the 90s country era. Speaking of serious songs, “Victoria’s Secret” takes the title of the lingerie brand and twists it into a story of woman who craves for romantic attention so much that she cheats on her ‘always working, never home’ husband with the narrator, the “only one who knows Victoria’s Secret.” Musically and vocally, it’s a very interesting song and perhaps the only outlier like it in his considerable career. There are strings and a lonesome acoustic guitar and bending electric steel/slide guitar chords, and cello audible in the mix as he sings “I’m the only one who knows” in a raising, almost off-key way which actually speaks to the sadness about the whole affair, not only for the woman in this song but also for Keith’s narrator who is also as lonely as her based on the way he sings that line. It’s heart breaking, really.

As if to keep us from falling into that lonesome pit for too long, the record picks up the pace with the follow-up track, “No Honor Among Thieves.” In many ways, both in terms of melody and lyrics, it’s not hard to see this one as some sort of sequel to “Should’ve Been A Cowboy” but really it’s exactly what it is, a nice album song about a time in the lawless American west. It was actually smart to not release that song (which was sequenced at track 4, a place often home to hit radio songs on an album’s sequencing (particularly in the 1990s when cassettes and compact discs ruled the world) because the song behind it, track 5 which would end “Side A” of a cassette, works as the perfect radio-ready ballad. “Upstairs Downtown” tells the story of a young woman trying to find a place in the world, a place which finds her moving to a small apartment in the city. It’s a story that isn’t all sunshine and roses and it actually ends with her returning home after the big city isn’t as accepting of her as much as she had hoped. Toby plays narrator on this story song and, as a single, it scraped the Top 10 but in retrospect it’s amazing that such a story song like this was not only radio ready but the follow-up to the chart topping “Who’s That Man.”

Now, the song starting off Side B on this record, is the very on brand Toby Keith “You Ain’t Much Fun.” a Honky Tonkin’ song about a man who gave up the party life ways to be with the woman in his life. He laments a whole life of honey do’s and how she reeled him in under basic false pretenses. It’s a great number, and one that certainly sounds as great now as it does 30 plus years after it was originally recorded. “In Other Words,” harkens to some of the mid-tempo ballads from Merle Haggard while “The Woman Behind The Man” is standard romantic fare. “Life Was A Play (The World A Stage)” is a clear melodic sibling to “Should’ve Been A Cowboy” and it’s easy to see the label was trying to, at least a little bit, capture the sonic magic of that song with this track but the label, thankfully, didn’t actually release this song as a single, lest their burgeoning star be seen as a one-note artist (which Toby’s most-definitely never has been). It’s a song actually about a family supporting their child as he’s growing up, making his way through life and how everything is ok now as he’s well into adulthood. It’s a sweet song but certainly better left where it was, on this record.

Boomtown closes with the title track, a rocking hot story song about the kind of towns which become hot due to local economies, particularly in Oklahoma’s oil days and how fast the cities and local area how “it got real quiet here” in a boomtown. The story tells a story of the locals who are left behind and a man who is still trying make a dollar in the boomtown. It’s a strong ending to an album which showcased Toby Keith’s star potential but still found him being passed around from the Polydor label into the A&M label, where Toby would Record the next album Blue Moon instead of being returned to the parent label Mercury. Either he was seen, as Mark Chestnutt was with MCA’s Decca record label revival, as the flagship artist for a new sister label, or someone the team at Mercury Nashville didn’t like working with — but not enough to let him go — But, more on that later when we get to Dream Walkin’, Toby’s fourth — and last — album for the Mercury/Polygram label group.