Country legend Keith Urban is a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, but he had no idea how deeply he’d be affected by his trip to see Springsteen on Broadway a few years back. When Springsteen described having a dream where he tells his father he embodies him as a performer — “Look, Dad. That guy onstage? That’s how I see you” — Urban was stunned. “I just sat there holding back tears so badly,” he recalls in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now. When the performance ended, Urban and his wife, Nicole Kidman, were supposed to go backstage. “I said to Nic, ‘I can’t go back there. We’ve got to go.’ We went outside, sat in the car, and I bawled like a baby. Man, he hit some nerve in me. I couldn’t go backstage.”
For Urban, that moment inevitably evoked his own fraught relationship with his father, a high-functioning alcoholic whose passion for American country music ended up inspiring his son’s journey from Australia to Nashville, and the entire musical career that followed. “Break the Chain,” a highlight of Urban’s strong new album, High, was written in a similar emotional burst, drawing on that relationship and the possibility of escaping generational cycles. “Man, this fucking song just poured out of me,” he says.
In a wide-ranging interview on the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Urban goes deep on the making of his new album, the art of lead guitar, his time on the road with Taylor Swift, and much more. Some highlights follow; to hear the whole interview, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.
Urban saw Taylor Swift’s potential when she opened for him in 2009. “What she is now, she was that, when she was opening for me,” Urban says. “Her vision was way off into the future… She sees where she’s going to be, crystal clear. And that’s the kind of thing that helped her navigate through so many waters that would have killed any other artist. So much negativity, so much hatred from people, so much, God, just straight-up shit that she got flung in all directions from people, but she clearly had her sights on the future and her abilities. And what I love about Taylor is she was always willing to confront her inabilities and work on them. She worked on being a better singer. She worked on being a better performer. She was always a great writer. She worked on all of it… got better and better and better.”
He admires how his friend John Mayer found a guitar-heavy side gig in Dead and Company, and would love to do something similar. “I adore John and love that,” he says. “The first time I saw that was when Peter Frampton toured with Bowie on the Glass Spider Tour. I remember thinking, that’s so cool. He doesn’t have to do any of the press, no meet and greets. He just stands up there and plays guitar all night. That’d be fun as hell. I’ve definitely harbored a desire to do that at some point in my life. Just go out and tour as a guitar player in somebody’s band. I would love it. I know it would improve my playing exponentially if I didn’t have to run around!”
One of the most rollicking songs on his new album, “Laughing all the Way to the Drank,” started as a jam session. “Every time I came back to it, I went, man, this thing feels so freaking good,” says Urban. “So I called this great songwriter, Ben Burgess, and I said, ‘What do you think of when you hear this music?’ And he goes, ‘Well, man, it’s kind of like, I don’t know, laughing all the way to the bank.’ And I went, ‘What about laughing all the way to the drank?’ And then off we went writing the song.”
He wanted his new album to capture some of the feel of a Nineties favorite, Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too — the only album by New Radicals. “The records I’ve made that I’ve been the happiest with are the ones that just have that sort of free-flowing thing about them,” he says. “One of the records I keep coming back to was the New Radicals record. I listened to it again recently, and I was like, ‘Why did I love that record so much?’” He realized it was the album’s mix of tight pop songs with looser, more stream-of-consciousness tracks. “The whole record just ebbs and flows between sort of order and chaos in a beautiful way. And that’s what I hope my records have ultimately been, is a bit of a mix of order and chaos — you know, relative to what I do.”
He’s enjoyed some of the recent country crossover efforts, and is most looking forward to Lana Del Rey’s country album. “I think Lana’s album is of most interest to me,” he says. “Because she’s one of the rare artists that I think will so beautifully bring in [country] elements to make this a fresh Lana Del Rey record without it being a formulaic record in any way.”
He’s never been comfortable in a cowboy hat. “Yeah, and I have to remind people,” he says, “Johnny Cash didn’t wear one. George Jones didn’t wear one. Charley Pride didn’t wear one. Merle Haggard didn’t wear one. Glenn Campbell didn’t wear one. I’ll keep going down the list!” He did give it a shot, in private, when he first moved to Nashville. “I tried a couple of hats quietly at home in my bedroom. I’m not that guy. I gotta gotta be who I am.”
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