In August 2024—just a month prior to the release of his new album, High—Keith Urban took the stage in Athens, Alabama, and played a two-hour set for more than 5,000 people, running through hits from throughout his career and covering Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” It was, for the most part, a typical show: energetic yet focused, spontaneous but polished, never beholden to production design. What made it different was the setting. He was playing the parking lot of Buc-ee’s #57, just off I-65. Just beyond the crowds of Urbanites packed at the makeshift stage were travelers going about their business, pumping gas into their SUVs and RVs and carrying armloads of brisket sandwiches to their cars.
It was an unusual spot for a concert, even a challenging one, but that’s exactly what appealed to Urban. The Australia-raised/Nashville-based artist has closed out the year with a series of unconventional shows—including moments-notice pop-up concerts and even an unannounced gig at the airport—all of which culminated in the announcement of a new world tour. It’s not so much about attracting fans so much as it’s about bringing his music to new space and getting back to the excitement of his early club days, when he was striving to find an audience and striving even harder to keep them.
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Urban is looking to take that energy and that intimacy back on the road with him in 2025. “I wanted to find unusual places to play and not just the usual modes of playing. It was really about getting the show right back down to its purest form: cheap, basically no lights, very little production, plug in, let’s go. Let’s see if we can hold this thing together. That’s where I come from, so it’s not like it’s something I have to learn. But I do want to make sure I still have those muscles working.”
In a town that does things by the book, Urban is intent on trying new things, tinkering around with formula. Sometimes it’s a huge success. Other times… not so much. He’ll be the first to admit that shaking things up is not always the best idea. He tested out a new recording process and even finished an album, titled 615, before realizing that it wasn’t very good. He shelved most of it, kept a few songs, and created High, his best effort in years. It’s an album entrenched but never quite cemented in contemporary country, open to strange whims and wild ideas: eccentric and rambunctious, perfect to take out on a world tour.
Over more than 30 years in Nashville, Urban has proved to be anything but a twang purist. He may write country songs, but he plays and sings them with rockstar bravado, with a steely voice that slips easily into a Tennessee-by-way-of-the-southern-hemisphere drawl and ripping guitar solos that sound more like Brian May or Steve Gaines than Don Rich or even Brad Paisley. Long ago he could have settled into a cushy role as Nashville’s elder statesman or a legacy artist playing the hits, but even in his late 50s, Urban remains restless enough to still make records in a way he describes as “disheveled.”
As he prepares for his world tour, Urban spoke with Spin about busking at the airport, learning from failure, playing his guitar more, and indulging some truly harebrained schemes in the studio.
You’re announcing a new world tour. Are there things that you look forward to or things that you dread when you’re on the road?
Keith Urban: It sounds obvious, but I’m always looking forward to putting new tours together. I love working up new songs, new set pieces, new productions, just everything. And then things unfold on the road and songs evolve. The show evolves and the whole experience grows in really interesting ways. Playing them night after night, you find little detours that you start taking. Or new rivers start to flow with new estuaries. You explore. The ideas that work stay in the set and become part of the song. I don’t like repetition. I don’t want to be playing songs and trying to replicate a particular version of them. Your heart has to be in it.
You’ve done some interesting shows—busking at the airport, playing in a Buc-ee’s parking lot. What did you learn from those experiences that you’ll take on the road?
The Nashville airport show was unannounced. We’d gone in the week before and scouted out a couple of spots that looked like they’d be good—quick to get in and get out. And there was this tiny little area that had a small stage, kinda wedged in between a couple of bars. It was very corporate looking, but had these little speakers suspended from the roof. We just came in without a road crew and played as a three piece, just bass, drums, guitar, no production, and a shitty PA. It’s just your songs and your musicianship. I loved it so much, especially the quirky nature of the transient audience—people walking around the terminal and going, Is that a cover band? What’s going on? And then wanting to watch but they can’t because they’ve got to find their gate or catch their flight. We played about 45 minutes, back to back to back songs, and then got out of there.
It’s not only changing how you’re playing, but who you’re playing to and how they hear you.
It was like going back to the clubs and playing in a cover band and nobody knows who you are. Nobody cares who you are. You’ve got to try to do something to get their attention. There’s something great about that challenge. I mean, there were some people who knew us and knew the songs, but there are many more people just walking by, not even looking up. And you’re like, What can I do right now to get that person’s attention?
Are you thinking about the live experience when you’re working on an album?
I’m never quite sure how conscious I am about it. Sometimes I do think about it when I’m writing. How would this sound live? I have certainly written songs based on the needs I have in the setlist. Oh, I wish I had more of this kind of song, and I’ll write songs specifically to that. But I did an album in ’22 called 615, which was 13 songs, and I just bailed on the whole thing. I took four songs off it and then built a whole new record around it. Some of that was born of the fact that it didn’t feel like it was going to be a great album to tour the way I want to tour. It had a lot of ballads, had a lot of middle-of-the-road stuff. It’s not a real spirited record.
It must have been hard to let go of that record.
Not really. I was touring in ’22, and if I was off the road for a few days, I’d go into the studio and record a song. I had a bunch that I really love, but because we were recording one song at a time, I had a lot of songs that sounded really good on their own. That felt great, and my team was like, alright, bring the record in and play it for us. But when I tried to sequence these songs, I was like, oh shit. A lot of them just sound the same. Here’s a good ballad. Great. But so’s the next one. And the next one. I was really struggling to sequence it in a way that I like to sequence albums, with lots of ups and downs. I started to realize that I didn’t have a record. Maybe I’ve got a third of a record. But I went and played it for the team, just in case I was wrong. I’ve been wrong before.
What was their reaction?
Well, I hit play, and about four songs in, I hit stop. I told them, I’m sorry but this is not my album. They said it was lacking some uptempo songs, but I knew it was more than that. So I kept four songs—“Messed Up As Me,” “Daytona,” “Heart Like a Hometown,” and “Break the Chain”—and built a new record around them. In hindsight, I’ve never done that before—touring and recording at the same time. When I’m not touring, I’m usually recording, but this is the first time I’ve tried to do both at the same time, and it didn’t work out.
What did you learn from that experience?
I guess I shouldn’t change the way I make records because I’ve always done it one way, which is loose and spontaneous. And I learned that I shouldn’t change that up. Usually, if I’m not feeling a song, I’ll just scrap it. Even if I’ve booked players for that day, I just won’t do the song. I’ll do whatever the hell I feel like doing that day. With 615, I felt like I should be a bit more disciplined. This is the song I said I was going to do, so this is the song I’m going to do. But it ended up being a very linear record, and it lacked spirit and dimension and themes. But when I made this record, I thought there was a lot of energy happening around all the songs, even the ballads, and that excites me. I learned my lesson, and I’ll always be a bit disheveled with the way I make records in the future.
Does that change the way you work as a guitar player and how you find your way into the songs with that instrument?
I was playing some tracks for Dann Huff one day. I’ve done so many records with him, and we were doing a record called Graffiti U in 2017. I was at his house and he asked me, how come you don’t play guitar on your records as much as you used to? I said, Dann, There’s a shitload of guitar on the record. What are you talking about? And he says, yeah, but it’s textural. It’s atmospheric. Where are the solos? But I don’t want to just put a solo on a song just to have a solo. When we record a track, I’ll sit there in the studio with a guitar in hand, hit playback, and then just respond to the track. If the track doesn’t pull something out of me, then I guess it doesn’t need guitar. Dann says, why does the track make you not want to play guitar? I was like, ah. Fuck you, Dann. It was a simple question, and I thought about it for years. Why do I create songs that don’t inspire me to play guitar? I started to feel like I needed to get back to more guitar playing, and that definitely made its way onto this record.
How did that work this time around?
Most of the songs I write almost always start with the music and then the lyrics come absolutely last. So the music is informing the story, and they’ve got to go together just right. So if there’s going to be a guitar solo, it’s got to be inspired by the emotion of the music, which inspired the lyrics. So theoretically, it should all go together because it’s all inspired by the same thing. It’s like, I know the music is trying to say something in “Break the Chain.” It starts with a plaintive acoustic opening riff—melancholy but at peace with the melancholy. The lyrics came quite quickly for that song. The music was telling me to write those words. That’s the beautiful conundrum of alchemy, where I’ve freed myself of everything so something can flow. If it happens, it’s amazing. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too. But I like when it’s allowed to be an organic portal.
Can you tell me about “Go Home W U,” the one with Lainey Wilson? Was that a voice you had in mind when you were writing that song?
We wrote that song back in 2020, Breland, Sam Sumser, Sean Small, and me. We had a writing camp for about two weeks and wrote a ton of songs. That wasn’t written as a duet. It was written because it was COVID and nothing was open and we were like, “Let’s just write a song imagining that things are open and what that would be like.” The songs sat around for almost four years. I’d heard Lainey sing on some early recordings she’d done with Jay Joyce, and the second I hear her voice, I was like, who is this? Is that her real voice? And of course, when you meet her, she talks exactly like that. She’s like Reba. Completely authentic. 100 percent legit. You don’t hear the real deal very often. I knew I wanted to find something to sing with her. Then she just blew up. I figured everybody would be jumping to sing with her, but I sent the song to her and she put her vocal on it.
You’ve also got that duet with Jelly Roll, “Don’t Want To.” There seems to be a lot more duets and collaborations going on in Nashville.
Obviously, country has a great history of collabs and duets and even supergroups, but it does seem to have proliferated quite a bit. Look, at the end of the day, I think we’re all aware when odd artists are thrown together to jack up their streaming numbers. But I love it when you can tell it’s a real thing. When Jelly Roll asked me about that song, he asked me because we share our own kind of struggles in the past. I really appreciate that he knew I would know the story.
One of the songs on this record that sounds like it was made for the live experience is “Laughing All the Way to the Drank.”
Whenever we do soundcheck, my drummer, Terrence F. Clark, will just start playing something on drums, and I’ll start jamming with him. He’s a great rhythmic drummer, which is very inspiring when you want to jam. I was going to write with Michael Elizondo, who’s an ungodly bass player, so I asked him if I could bring Terrence in with me and the three of us just jam. It was Terrence on drums, me on electric guitar, and Michael on bass. Nobody said anything. We just let Terrence play whatever the hell he wanted to play, and then we fell in behind him. We did that for an entire day and got maybe 11 tracks. One of them was this song. The melody was kind of there, but the lyrics were just gibberish. I was just singing gibberish. But the track had amazing energy. So I called up Ben Burgess to see if he could make anything of it. He listened to it and said, how about “Laughing All the Way to the Bank”? And as soon as he said it, in my stupid bumper-sticker way, I was like, well, we have to call it “Laughing All the Way to the Drank”! We knew immediately what the story was going to be and were off and running. The whole thing was built on that free-form jam.
And there’s that sequence where you go from hip-hop scratching to country banjo and then a rock solo.
Well, we had finished the song and I was in the shower one day and was like, oh, I’ve got this idea for a bridge. I don’t even think the song needed a bridge. But what if a cowboy and cowgirl shuffle out onto the dance floor and [the] DJ says we’re gonna throw it back and start playing some ’90s throwback country. And people get upset and start yelling, what the hell is this crap? Where are the banjos? And so the banjos kick in. And they’re like, where are the fiddles? And the fiddles kick in. And it all goes together. It was this weird mini-cinematic idea. It took some figuring out to make it happen, but we got it.
The last piece of the puzzle was the pickup truck firing up at the beginning of the song. Mike Elizondo found a great sample, but then I thought, we’ve got to get a neighbor screaming at the guy for revving his truck so loud. My day-to-day manager, Elisabeth Ashley, had come by the studio, so I asked her, can you get on the mic and scream, “Hey! It’s 6:00 in the morning!” And God bless her she did.
So you’re just corralling passersby into your weird schemes.
Ha, yeah. But that’s the spirit that was much more on my earlier records. Just do it. Don’t think about it. Certainly don’t overthink it. You can always replace it later. But there’s that magical spontaneous thing when you’re putting an idea down fast. Those moments are just about trying to capture that spirit.
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