Toby Keith Explains Who Inspired ‘Don’t Let the Old Man In’ for ‘The Mule’

No one weaves a tale quite like Clint Eastwood, and Toby Keith knows a good hook when he hears one. The duo were sharing a golf cart last year at Eastwood’s charity tournament in Pebble Beach, Calif. is both a testament to their friendship and a stroke of good fortune. The encounter led Keith to pen the beautifully haunting song that lingers at the end of The Mule. The Eastwood-directed and starring film, in theaters now, is based on the true story of a WWII veteran in his 80s who takes a job as a courier for a Mexican drug cartel.

Out on the green, Eastwood shared that he’d be starting work on The Mule in two days, which also happened to be his 88th birthday. Struck by Eastwood’s relentless energy at an age when many are content to sit and reflect, Keith asked how he keeps going.

“He said, ‘I just get up every morning and go out. And I don’t let the old man in,’ ” Keith recounts. “And I thought, I’m writing that.

The song’s aesthetic, at once emotionally resigned and quietly triumphant, turned out to be right in tune with that of the film. Its refrain, “Many moons I’ve lived/my body’s weathered and worn/Ask yourself how old you’d be if you didn’t know the day you were born?” was inspired by another anecdote Keith had been carrying around about the grandmother of his 65-year-old friend who never had a birth certificate and didn’t know her age.

“I didn’t try to take what he told me about the movie,” Keith says of his muse. “I tried to take the character he told me about, and look through his eyes and think that maybe if you were 40 and found out the cartel is putting drugs in your pecans you might say, ‘Whoa, I don’t want to do this because I don’t want to spend 40 years in prison.’

—
Photo Credit: s_bukley / Shutterstock.com