Jamey Johnson‘s new Midnight Gasoline album might not have happened if not for the tragic loss of Toby Keith. It was the passing of the Country Music Hall of Fame member that inspired Johnson to return to the studio to record his first album of original songs in 14 years, since The Guitar Song came out in 2010.

“The writing was already coming back to me, piece by piece, but I still didn’t have any ambitions on making a record,” Johnson tells Billboard. “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. 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, and so it’s time to get busy. After he passed away, I immediately started talking about this session and started trying to get all the particulars in order. It was time for me to get in the studio again.”

Johnson was a friend and fan of Keith, whom he wrote with, and learned plenty from as they collaborated together.

“Toby Keith had one of the most amazing memories of anybody,” Johnson boasts. “I mean, perfect recall on lyrics he hasn’t seen or heard in 34 years. [He] remembers every chord, remembers every word. He could remember names, faces, conversations, ideas, just an infinite stream of memory. And as a songwriter, he was very picky about phrases he would use. If it didn’t sound like his vernacular, it had to change until it fit right because he wasn’t going to put something in there that didn’t sound the way he would talk.”

Johnson and Keith were already working on another song, one that they sadly did not get to finish before Keith succumbed to stomach cancer.

“We were working on a song toward the end,” Johnson recalls. “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. We laughed a bunch, and it was one of those 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 sit down and finish this thing up.’

“He always gave me the feeling that this wasn’t nothing,” he continues. “He was gonna beat this: ‘You don’t worry about me, pal. I got this’ — and that lasted right up until February. I don’t know what happens with the songs now, 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.”

An established songwriter on his own, Midnight Gasoline includes four songs that Johnson didn’t write. But whether or not Johnson penned a song means little to him when it comes to putting them on his new project.

“My job as a songwriter and singer is to take these songs that were given to me by God and deliver them to His people and do it at the best of my ability with a positive attitude and joy in my heart,” he says. “Something I got from this album that I don’t think I’ve gotten before is the ability to do that, and I appreciate it.”

Midnight Gasoline will be out on November 8. See a track list for the record below. Order the record, and find all of Johnson’s music and upcoming shows at JameyJohnson.com.

Track List for Midnight Gasoline:

1. “Bad Guy” (Jamey Johnson and Dale Dodson)
2. “Midnight Gasoline” (Scotty Emerick, Dean Dillon and Jeff Hyde)
3. “What a View” (Jamey Johnson, Randy Houser, Rob Hatch and Dallas Davidson)
4. “21 Guns” (Jamey Johnson and Jim “Moose” Brown)
5. “Someday When I’m Old” (Aimee Mayo, Chris Lindsey and Troy Verges)
6. “Trudy” featuring Randy Houser (Charlie Daniels)
7. “One More Time” (Jamey Johnson, Ernest Keith Smith and Rob Hatch)
8. “Saturday Night in New Orleans” (Jamey Johnson, Chris Stapleton and Tony Joe White)
9. “Sober” (Jamey Johnson and James Slater)
10. “I’m Tired of It All” (Dallas Davidson and Kyle Fishman)
11. “No Time Like the Past” (Jamey Johnson and Chris Stapleton)
12. “What Do You Answer To” (Jamey Johnson, Ira Dean, Ajay Popoff and Jeremy Popoff)