With eight ARIA, four Grammy, a whopping 15 Academy of Country Music and 13 Country Music awards under his belt, it’s no question Keith Urban knows how to make great music.
The country star has been performing for more than three decades to sell-out stadium crowds, but it’s the intimate smaller venue shows – similar to when he first started out, which still excite him.
“To show off your skills up close and make a real connection with the smaller crowd, it’s been a blast,” Keith told Richard Wilkins.
“We’re going to get in the club, we’re going to have a band with no video screens, no production, no lighting, no nothing and people will be right here in front of us and they’ll know that this is real, there’s no set list, there’s nothing – we take requests.”
His 12th studio album, High, is out later this month and the High and Alive World Tour will promote the new tracks, as well as all Keith’s other favourites, with multiple shows Down Under included.
Keith revealed a different version of High is what music executives had originally greenlit in the studio.
But that wasn’t good enough for him.
“I made another album, which I scrapped and that’s never happened to me ever,” he said.
“But the 13 songs, I felt okay about it and I went in and played it for my team and I was about four songs in and I just hit stop – I went, ‘this is not the record’, I had a better record in me.”
With the amount of touring all over the world he does, Keith said he had to believe in the songs he was creating and in this instance – he didn’t.
“I was touring when I made it and so we were sort of doing a song every now and then and each one individually felt and sounded really good, but when I strung them all together, I was like, ‘oh, it’s all kind of the same,'” he said.
“I’d already worked over a year on this record and I couldn’t bear the thought of starting again, but I also couldn’t bear the thought of putting out something I didn’t love.”
The High and Alive World Tour will hit Aussie shores in August 2025 and tickets go on sale September 13.