Songfacts®:

• In this comical country tune written by Bobby Braddock, a frustrated Toby Keith can't get a word in edgewise with his self-absorbed significant other, leading to his refrain, "I wanna talk about me!" Braddock actually wrote the song for Blake Shelton, who released his debut album earlier in the year, but Shelton's record label thought a country-rap number would be too risky for a newcomer. It became Toby's seventh #1 hit on the Country chart.
• Braddock thought the brashness of the lyrics would be perfect for Toby, on par with the singer's shamelessly confident anthem "How Do You Like Me Now!?" There was just one problem: Toby's A&R person absolutely hated the song and rejected it. Thankfully, Braddock was able to meet with DreamWorks Nashville's President, James Stroud, who proclaimed, "This is a damn hit!"
• Braddock told Rolling Stone Country how his own "I wanna talk about me" moment inspired him to write the track: "There were two inspirations for that song. One was a very good friend of mine's assistant had been fired, so her workload doubled. Whenever I talked to her on the phone, that was all she'd talk about. I'd try to talk to her about something else and she'd just keep going back to that. I played it for her over the phone and she didn't say anything. The next day, she called and said, 'Did you write that song about me?' I said, 'That's right!' The other inspiration was Blake Shelton. He was going around doing this really raunchy little rap song he made up. To hear him in his Oklahoma white-boy accent doing a rap song was pretty hilarious. So, I thought, 'I need to write a country-rap song for Blake.' I wanted to write something about my friend and her loquaciousness, so I thought I would turn it into a rap thing."
• Both Braddock and Toby weren't sure this could be a hit, because country fans would call it a rap song and rap fans would call it a country song. "They're going to call it a rap," Toby told Billboard in 2001. "[But] there ain't nobody doing rap who would call it a rap."
• In 2010, Braddock turned down a lucrative deal to allow Houston Democratic mayor Bill White to use this in commercials to support his race for governor of Texas. Although he agreed with the mayor's policies, he didn't want to politicize the song. "I felt that it belonged not only to me, but to Toby Keith and his fans as well," he explained.