American Ride is the thirteenth studio album by American country music artist Toby Keith. It was released on October 6, 2009 by Show Dog Nashville. Its lead-off single was the title track, which became his 19th No. 1 single on the BillboardHot Country Songs charts in October. The album includes 12 songs, 11 of which Keith wrote or co-wrote, and one of which is a tribute to Wayman Tisdale. This was Keith's last album for the Show Dog Nashville label before merging with Universal South to form Show Dog-Universal Music. As of June 2014, the album has sold 500,000 copies and was certified Gold in the U.S. by the RIAA.
As with his last album, 2008's That Don't Make Me a Bad Guy, Keith produced the album himself and wrote most of the songs either by himself or with Bobby Pinson. The title track, also its lead-off single, was written by Joe West and Dave Pahanish; it is the only song on the album which Keith did not co-write, and one of the only singles in his career that he did not co-write.[1] Pahanish and West gave Keith this song because they considered him "the only guy in the world that could get away with cutting it,"[2] and he had the demo on his iPod for nearly a year before recording it.[3] On the BillboardHot Country Songs dated for the week of October 10, 2009, it became his nineteenth Number One hit.[4]
The second single, "Cryin' for Me (Wayman's Song)," was written as a tribute to basketball player and jazz musician Wayman Tisdale, a close friend of Keith's who died on May 15, 2009.[2] This song was released to radio in October 2009. "Every Dog Has Its Day," which Keith and Pinson wrote with John Waples, debuted in March 2010 as the third single release.
The album so far has a score of 72 out of 100 from Metacritic based on 4 "generally positive reviews".[5]Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic gave American Ride a three-and-a-half star rating out of five. Erlewine's review describes the title track positively, saying that it "casts a cynical eye[…]not celebrating down-home values but wondering where we're all headed[.]"[6] He added that the album "spends more time on the softer side" in comparison to the "swaggering" of most of his previous albums.[6] Ken Tucker of Billboard said that it had "a little less bluster and bravado," calling "Are You Feelin' Me" a "rare show of vulnerability" and "Loaded" a "rocking and rousing" song.[1] It received a B-minus rating from Entertainment Weekly critic Whitney Pastorek, who said that the "brash mockery of current events in the title track offset[s…] a sweet tribute to a friend who passed away" but added, "too few of these samey-sounding songs are memorable."[8]Slant Magazine critic Jonathan Keefe wrote that Keith "walks a fine line between self-mythologizing and self-parody" and said that the "uptempo numbers[…]don't amount to much more than empty posturing," rating the album three stars out of five.[10] In his Consumer Guide, Robert Christgau picked out two songs from the album ("Ballad of Balad" and "Cryin' for Me [Wayman's Song]") as a "choice cut".[9]
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