Toby Keith wasn’t always the easiest tour boss, Miranda Lambert admits — but his brand of “tough love” made her a better performer during an early phase of her career.

In a new appearance on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast, Lambert shares her experience of opening for Keith.

“Toby was I think, like, my fourth big major country tour,” she explains. “And I learned a lot.”

Keith threw her into the deep end of his live show, Lambert goes on to say, forcing her to adapt to his one-of-a-kind performance style and fan base.

“But I guess I needed that, because I was a baby and didn’t know what was going on yet. I was learning all the ropes of everything,” she continues.

“He was himself. Know what I mean? He was, like, authentically himself,” she continues. “Kind of did everything his own way. An outlaw in his own way.”

That authenticity made him an icon in his fans’ eyes.

“His fans taught me a lot, too, because they were really about Toby only,” Lambert goes on to say. “You had to work to get them to care…His outlaw, kind of, ‘I am who I am’ mentality, they kind of adopted that. It made me work for it, in a good way.”

Decades after that tour, Lambert saw Keith at an industry awards show in late 2023. He was being honored for his songwriting that night, and he was also battling stomach cancer. That would turn out to be the last time Lambert ever saw her former tour boss in person: He died of his illness just a few months later.

Even though he was gravely ill, Lambert says that Keith was still a phenomenal performer — and still unapologetically himself.

“He was, even at the end, really about the music,” she notes.

Keith died in February 2024, after an almost-two-year-long battle with cancer. He was 62 years old.