Throwback Thursday: Toby Keith, ‘Hope on the Rocks’

Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly series showcasing an album, single, music video or performance of a bygone era and its personal and/or cultural significance.

The walls of the pub are lined with photographs, some aged with cobwebs, cigarette smoke and dust. The smorgasbord of characters illustrate a long, storied history within the brick and mortar; there’s a lonesomeness creeping in the floorboards, as many more feet shuffle in and out of its doors. That’s the nature of small-town living, vessels shift across the woodwork, connections lost and found muscle their way through life and turn to watering holes to cope with a pain so deep it appears insurmountable. Toby Keith certainly knew what he was talking about in his song “Hope on the Rocks,” the gloomy mid-tempo title cut to this sixteenth studio set, released in 2012, which exhumes unshakable feelings of misery and torture.

“Brady was a baseball star / Til he struck out and took his car and drove away,” he scribbles a set of characters, most broken and in agony, as they float in and out of each other’s lives. “Sissy lost her little boy / Hitch-hiked up to Illinois, so they say / Then, it rained so hard that Mary tried to take her life with suicide / And disappear just like the thunder…”

“Hope on the Rocks,” a solo write, which tragically never took off on terrestrial radio, is among Keith’s best offerings, a rich portrait of middle-America. As grim as it is portrayed, it is very much rooted in reality. “Where do they go? They come here / To drown in their sorrow and cry in their beer,” he sings on the chorus, a polished and sweeping universal truth. “They’re in need of a mind bender / I’m a bartender / At the end of the day, I’m all they’ve got / Hope on the rocks.”

He opens the second verse to paint even more classic characterizations. “Charlie’s wife filed for divorce, and Charlie bought a quarter horse and now he’s ridin’ fence / Upside down and couldn’t pay, they hauled Sue’s mobile home away / And we ain’t seen her since / Larry’s long time fiancé got kicked out of the P.T.A and moved her kids back east with someone else.” Keith’s performance is somehow warm but heavy ⎯⎯ serving as the narrator who peaks into others’ lives is a double-edged sword, you could say.

Listen below:

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