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CMT: Earlier this year, Natalie Maines said in an interview that she hated your song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue." Our CMT.com message boards went crazy after that. Do you think comments like that can get blown out of proportion?

Toby Keith: I think the only thing that got blown out of proportion is that they said there was a feud. I barely even commented on the situation. I've been told that she went in some major publications and made four or five [comments] like we were lobbing the ball back and forth. But it's America. She can think what she wants to about me; I don't care.

If she makes it a big war, I'll bury her. She can think about my song what she wants to. If she wants to get personal about it, then I'll be her Huckleberry. She said what she said, and hey … . The greatest thing that I find in it that's funny is that usually when somebody says something about this song, they open their blowhole and something flies out. They realize real quick, in just a few days, that they probably bit off more than they could chew. Because they start feeling the heat from the military, from families who have sons and daughters preparing to go to Iraq and who are in Afghanistan already and all the conflicts that we're in.

That's where I underestimated this song when I wrote it. It was just feelings that I felt, but I didn't realize that it was an anthem for the military people and how much it's meant to them. You step on their ground, they starting fighting back at you. So when somebody steps up and throws something out there at random just out of their blowhole that's really unnecessary, the next time you hear a statement out of them, it's a little lighter and then it's retracted a little lighter and a little lighter. Then Country Weekly comes out that we've got a feud. We don't have no feud. I haven't made it a feud yet.

It's a great way to sell magazines, but there's no truth in it. Somebody asked me one time what I thought about it. I said, 'Look, you're asking Barry Bonds, a super hit-maker songwriter. That's what I do, I write songs. I've had a string of No. 1's that I don't think anybody can take away from me, no matter who you are. I have been BMI songwriter of the year. I am a big-time songwriter, and first and foremost songwriter, so I'm in the big league of that. By you asking me my opinion on what I think of what she said about me, that's like asking Barry Bonds what he thought about what a softball player said about his swing. You don't do that. She's not a songwriter, so we can't discuss the mechanics of the song. Why don't you just go down on Second Avenue and pick one of those homeless guys and ask him what he thinks about it? To me it's the same. And that's all I've commented on. I haven't said anything about her song "Goodbye Earl" or any of that stuff.