Toby Keith photo courtesy of Show Dog Nashville.

If you look at the credits on Toby Keith’s albums, it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to figure out that he writes most of his own material — and that he’s pretty prolific.

As it turns out, Toby’s writing even more songs now than ever. It’s not that he gets more ideas than he used to. He’s simply figured out a better way to manage them.

“I have an application on my iPhone that’s a voice recorder,” he told The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader. “I used to carry one of those little digital handheld things around, but they’re like sunglasses — you end up losing them. I always have my phone with me, and about a year and a half ago, I started spitting stuff into it. I’d hit that [record] button and hum it to myself. When I got home last winter and started writing… I had 45 ideas. I would have had three if I didn’t have that recorder.”

One thing he’s not likely to record anymore is movie ideas. Toby wrote and produced Beer For My Horses, and it proved to be too much of a distraction from his creative core.

“My music suffered, and my health suffered from doing too much and not getting enough sleep,” he said. “I just wasn’t on my game. To go do a [film] project, try to carry it and be the guy is just too much. I have to keep driving with my music.”

Toby’s next collection of music comes out Oct. 5. Bullets In The Gun includes his current single, “Trailerhood.” The deluxe version will also feature four live remakes of songs made famous by Johnny Paycheck, Gordon Lightfoot and Roger Miller.

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