One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, or, in the case of Blake Shelton’s would-have-been track off his debut album that ended up going to Toby Keith, one man’s rejected single is another man’s chart-topping hit. Years before becoming a star in his own right, Shelton was cutting demos with iconic songwriter Bobby Braddock. Braddock penned classic country tracks like “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

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The songwriter would earn yet another No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart with a song he wrote with Shelton in mind. But it wasn’t Shelton who would end up singing it.

Blake Shelton’s Label Rejected The Rap Country Single

A lot rides on an artist’s debut single. It’s a musician’s first chance to make a lasting impression in a matter of minutes. Ideally, the music would give listeners an idea of who the artist is personally and creatively while still being catchy enough to land a spot in regular radio rotation. More often than not, an up-and-coming artist’s record label has the final say-so on whether a track fits this delicate criteria. Unfortunately for Shelton, a song that Bobby Braddock wrote with the young country singer in mind didn’t quite cut it.

The song in question was a pseudo-rap track called “I Wanna Talk About Me.” As Shelton explained during a 2025 appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, he would often show up to the studio with “stupid raps. I would come into the studio singing every day about, you know, doo-doo and things like that. You know, fun things. So, [Bobby] wrote me the song. We recorded it, and the label at the time said, ‘We don’t want any part of that song.’”

Braddock asked Shelton’s label, Giant Records, if he could shop “I Wanna Talk About Me” to different artists. After the label gave the songwriter the green light to pitch it elsewhere, Braddock went to Toby Keith. The singer had released a stylistically similar song, “Getcha Some,” three years earlier in 1998. In an interview with Songwriter Universe, Braddock said that Keith “loved it right off.”

The Song Turned Into A Massive Hit For Toby Keith

Blake Shelton’s label might not have seen the potential in his version of “I Wanna Talk About Me,” but the rest of the world certainly fell head over heels for what would become a Toby Keith hit. The “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” singer released the tongue-in-cheek number on his second album, Pull My Chain, in 2001. It was an instant hit, skyrocketing to the top of the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart and garnering Keith his seventh No. 1 single. “He always reminded me that it found its right home,” Shelton joked on The Tonight Show.

Good-natured ribbing aside, history would show that Keith was right. The song had found a good home. “I thought it would be a natural for Toby because of the brashness of the lyric,” songwriter Bobby Braddock told Songwriter Universe. “It seemed like something he could pull off. I thought [the song] had a chance of doing well. But I was just totally floored that it was No. 1 for five weeks.”

Shelton, meanwhile, ended up going with the far more sentimental “Austin” as his debut single. Just like Keith was the right choice for “I Wanna Talk About Me,” the chart performance would show that Shelton was the right choice for “Austin.” The track was a massive hit for Shelton. The heartstring-tugging song took him to the top of the charts for five weeks and garnered him a crossover hit when it peaked at No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100. So, even though Shelton couldn’t live out his dreams of rapping on a hit song, we’d say that everyone walked away with the best single for them.