With a songwriter as prolific as Toby Keith, it should come as no surprise that he’s still got music in the vault.

In a new interview with Billboard, Jamey Johnson says that he and Keith were in the midst of writing sessions when the singer died of stomach cancer in February 2024.

• Keith announced his stomach cancer diagnosis in the summer of 2022.
• He took most of that year off to undergo treatment, but returned to the stage to receive the Icon Award at the first-ever People’s Choice Country Awards in September 2023.
• He gave an impassioned performance of “Don’t Let the Old Man In” at that show, and played a series of comeback shows to close out the year. His last show took place just a couple of months before his death.

“We were working on a song toward the end. I called him up one night and shared a few lines with him, and he added a few lines, and we turned around and wrote this whole verse,” Johnson remembers.

“We laughed a bunch,” he continues, “and it was one of those things that I thought, ‘This is great. There’s gonna come a time I’ll get out to Oklahoma or maybe he and I will meet up somewhere at a golf tournament, but we’ll have some time [to] sit down and finish this thing up.”

Johnson knew Keith was sick. But he says that he didn’t realize just how close to death the country great really was.

“He always gave me the feeling that this wasn’t nothing. He was gonna beat this: ‘Don’t worry about me, pal. I got this’,” he recalls. “And that lasted right up until [the month he died].”

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Johnson says that when Keith’s died, he felt newfound motivation to release his own music. In fact, that was the impetus behind Midnight Gasoline, the “In Color” singer’s first full-length release in 14 years, which is due out on Friday (Nov. 8).

“When Toby passed away, it moved everything into high gear because I realized that that was the end of his discography, that we weren’t getting another Toby Keith record,” he explains. “And that’s what drove me to wanting to finish my own discography.

“It’s what made me understand that I’m nowhere near done, so it’s time to get busy,” he continues.

Johnson says that there are still some unfinished Keith songs from the singer’s final writing sessions.

“I don’t know what happens with the songs now,” he says. “But I know some time is probably going to go by, and I might break them back out and revisit them later on. But I think right now the friends of his that I would consider finishing those songs with are still hurting, and it’s probably not time to start trying to do that just yet.”