Blake Shelton Recorded, & Then Passed On, This Song That Later Became One Of Toby Keith’s Biggest Hits

You can tell passing on this song still keeps Blake Shelton up at night.

A song has to be truly special to make it’s way onto an album. Country artists and country music writers are always trying to crack the code of the next biggest hit, and plenty of tracks that get pitched to artists either never see the light of day or end up in some other artist’s hands.

Blake Shelton has a story about that, and it’ll make you sick.

The country music star was interviewed recently and revealed a “what could have been” moment that certainly seems to still eat at him to this day. As the story goes, famous Nashville songwriter and producer, Bobby Braddock, wrote a song specifically for Blake Shelton, and though it was fast-paced and basically “country rap,” Braddock thought it was a perfect fit for Shelton:

“Bobby Braddock wrote the song for me because I used to go into the studio when we were working on my first album, and I would always have these stupid raps that I would make up about whatever that day. And Bobby said, ‘Oh, you want to sing a rap song? I wrote you a rap.”

That “rap song?” It was titled “I Wanna Talk About Me.”

Blake believed in the longtime songwriter’s vision, and recorded the song to be featured on his next album. However, before it could find a home as a Blake Shelton song, focus groups at Giant Records shot down the idea, and the record label punted on it:

“We recorded the song and it was going to be on my album. And at the time, I was on Giant Records and they did some of those focus group testing things about that stuff. And it was like they wanted to play four or five songs for these groups.

And the testing came back that on, ‘I Want To Talk About Me,’ It was so terrible that they said, ‘Not only do we not want this to be a single, but we don’t even think you should put it on your album. It’s that horrifying of a song.’”

Horrifying of a song? Give me a break.

It’s spoken-word nature is certainly different, and maybe that’s why the focus groups were thrown off by it. But the chorus of the tune that later became a mega-hit for another Okie, Toby Keith, is as catchy as they come:

“I wanna talk about me, wanna talk about I
Wanna talk about number one, oh my, me my
What I think, what I like, what I know, what I want, what I see
I like talking about you, you, you, you usually
But occasionally, I wanna talk about me
I wanna talk about me.”

The way Toby Keith sings that last “me” of the chorus hits hard every single time.

It would have been interesting to hear Blake Shelton’s take on the song, but the good news is that Shelton doesn’t seem too bothered or rattled by the fact that the focus groups at Giant Records canceled the flight of the song before it was even able to take off:

“Then of course Toby recorded it and I think had a two-month number one record on it. Those focus groups really nail it.”

This is also one of those moments in music history where you have to ask, “Would it have been a number one if Blake Shelton sang it?” I know it was written for him, but it just fits so well with Toby Keith. The Big Dog Daddy absolutely nailed it, and it acted as an incredibly successful second single from Keith’s 2001 Pull My Chain album.

Now anytime I fire it up, I’ll always think that Blake Shelton missed out on having one of the most recognizable songs of the 2000s.

“I Wanna Talk About Me”

The post Blake Shelton Recorded, & Then Passed On, This Song That Later Became One Of Toby Keith’s Biggest Hits first appeared on Whiskey Riff.