HIGH GROUND
From child guitar prodigy to global star, Keith Urban is a country music legend. Alcohol addiction took its toll prior to his marriage to Nicole Kidman, but after 18 years sober, he’s able to reflect and sing about the darker times on his new album
Keith Urban writes a rockin’ bar song. He’s a master of the country pop classic whose tale of star-crossed lovers or gathering of mates starts or ends at the local watering hole, and is therefore destined to be played in dive bars all over the world. There’s a few additions to his canon of bar songs on his new record High, like the singles Go Home W U and Messed Up As Me. These songs are plucked from the vault of memories. Urban has been sober for 18 years after entering rehab just four months after marrying Nicole Kidman.
He fought back tears as he paid tribute to his wife’s unwavering, loving support during his recovery with a raw, emotional speech at the recent ceremony honouring her with the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
“We got married in June 2006 and barely four months into our marriage, my addictions that I’d done really nothing about, blew our marriage to smithereens, and I went into the Betty Ford Center for three months,” he told the star-studded audience which included the couple’s two daughters Sunday Rose, 15, and Faith, 13.
“Four months into a marriage, I’m into rehab for three months, with no idea what was going to happen to us. And if you want to see what love in action really looks like, give that a whirl.”
Urban isn’t typically a confessional songwriter, even though Kidman has been his muse for love songs over the past two decades.
Instead, the songs on High demonstrate his uncanny ability to mine his own nostalgia for the many lives he’s lived, from child guitar prodigy to global superstar who took American country music to the mainstream masses.
And some of that life was spent in bars, as he explains about Messed Up As Me in a letter ahead of High’s release next week: “The music video is set across 2.45am to sunrise.
A lot of things happen in those hours, and I’ve been in every scene.
“I’ve got plenty of things to mine, you know,” he says from Nashville. “This record is definitely not only about where I’m at; that would make it a very linear record.
“Definitely, I’ve lived a life, and been a lot of people, and a lot of those people are represented in these songs.”
One of those people who continues to pop up in his work is the wide-eyed and determined 23year-old, born in New Zealand and raised in Queensland, who moved to Nashville in 1992 in the quest to become a country music star in America.
They call Nashville the “10-year town” because it can take a decade to bust through the gatekeepers of America’s country music capital and win a coveted record deal and the backing of the powerful radio station executives who anoint the next big things.
Through the lean years of hustle, until he cracked the US country charts with his 1999 self-titled album, Urban dreamed of the days he would have his own tour bus.
Now he’s got his own luxury bus.
He’s one of Nashville’s favoured kings and an inspiration, mentor and mate to the next wave of aspirants to his crown.
The queen of American country music’s female artist renaissance Lainey Wilson, who Urban tapped to sing with him on Go Home W U, captured just how influential he can be
when he shouts out a new artist. And it would make a great tour T-shirt.
“If Keith Urban thinks you can do it, you can do it,” Wilson says of her close friend.
After 25 years in Nashville, four Grammys, 20 million album sales and more than four billion streams, does he feel like he’s finally arrived? “It’s not lost on me that I pop up on artists’ T-shirts on stage at festivals … it’s a strange thing,” he says, laughing but also chuffed at the peer recognition.
“Like it doesn’t seem that long ago I was staying in the shitty hotel imagining what it must be like to be in a tour bus, and just hoping I could write a song to get on the radio.
“My goal was if I could just get on the radio, then I could tour and people would be, ‘He’s that guy that sings that song! Let’s go see him.’
“I always believed in what I could do live but I just wanted to get some songs that would get people to the gig. I see all those same things in Lainey, just the fire and the hunger and the passion and I’ve lost none of that.
“For all that I’ve done here, I don’t feel any bloody different from the guy who showed up here with the really shitty demo (tape) that I thought was kickass. God bless that beautiful naivety, that blind faith and unbridled conviction in oneself, because it carried me through all of it.”
Urban’s latest record High continues to flex his genre-fluid brand of country pop rock muscle.
He was an early adopter of the drum machine in Nashville, liking the sound of beats with banjo, and over the past two decades has continued to push the boundaries of country’s venerated traditions with pop and hip hopinfluenced production.
As fans came to discover when he took the judge’s seat at American Idol or The Voice, Urban knows every lyric of every new song and most of the old ones. He may be one of the most voracious music consumers on the planet and that obsession keeps him up to date on who’s doing the good stuff and how they’re doing it.
He says his teen daughters recently turned him on to gen Z icon, American singersongwriter Conan Gray.
“I’m listening to (Spotify playlist) New Music Friday every week, I’m listening to everything that’s coming out,” Urban says.
“I Shazam stuff all the time, TV commercials or some random background music for a car engine tutorial on Youtube, and I’m like ‘What is this? Who is this?’ and it’s some band I’d never heard of before but it was a really good sounding track.
“What we often hear is something that those artists have gleaned from past artists and their music and how they’ve filtered that into their music. And we recognise that because it’s probably an artist we love. I respond to those things like when I hear something that sounds like it’s Aussie pub rock or new wave.”
No doubt his daughters got a kick out of their father opening up his photo scrapbook for the music video for recent single Heart Like A Hometown.
The video is an adorable collage of throwback photos of Urban from a little boy with a big guitar to a mulleted teen posing in front of the Tamworth sign.
He dives way down memory lane when asked about unearthing the childhood snaps.
“I love that the Tamworth ones are in there. But my favourite one is where I’m in a nursing home, you can see a nurse in the background,” he says.
“And I’m six years old, playing guitar. It was with the little group my guitar teacher Sue Mccarthy had and she wanted us to do a recital.
“I thought this is great, my first gig you know, like in front of people. And it was in a nursing home.
“I love that I still have that photo because technically that is absolutely my first time standing in front of people, that weren’t my family, with a guitar in my hands.”
Urban will be back in Australia with a guitar in his hands next August for his High and Alive World Tour.
He opens the tour at the Newcastle Entertainment Centre on August 13 and then plays the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on August 15 and 16, Wollongong’s WIN Entertainment Centre on August 20, Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena on August 22 and 23. Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena on August 25 and 26 and Adelaide Entertainment Centre on August 28.
Tickets to the High and Alive world tour are on sale now. High is released on September 20
I’VE GOT PLENTY OF THINGS TO MINE, YOU KNOW... DEFINITELY, I’VE LIVED A LIFE