Keith Urban on New Album ‘High,’ Writing about His Dysfunctional Family Dynamic & Duetting With Lainey Wilson: ‘She Killed It’

Melinda Newman
·9 min read

As Keith Urban describes writing “Break the Chain” — the raw, confessional song about stopping destructive generational patterns that closes his new album, High — he provides tremendous insight into his creative process.

“I started playing this guitar that [co-writer] Marc Scibilia had in his studio with flat-wound strings and a rubber bridge, and it just made this interesting sound,” he explains. “The opening riff was what I played, and I started singing these words and the song just came out. I had no intention of addressing some of my raising and [having] an alcoholic father.”

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Urban himself is, of course, a father of two daughters with wife Nicole Kidman. “I don’t know if my dad, who passed away a long time ago, would be okay with the song or not, but he would love that it’s truthful, and the intent of it is a forward motion of trying to do things different,” he offers. “I guess I’m still working through things that I thought I was long at peace with.”

Urban surprised himself a few times in making his 11th studio set, out Sept. 20 via Capitol Records Nashville, including building the bones of the album from a discarded effort at a concept album he’d named 615. “I attempted to make a very different record, and that didn’t pan out, so I scrapped it and followed my muse and ended up with this album,” he says.

In February 2023, Urban brought in the 615 album to play for his team. “I thought they were going to go, ‘Great job, Keith! Let’s get these singles out, let’s get this tour booked!’ And instead, it was just crickets,” he says. ‘And I was like, “Oh, OK, this is not the record.’ I said to everybody, ‘Let’s push the tour off to 2025 and let me go finish a proper album.’”

Keith Urban
Keith Urban

Urban, who in June was named to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, crafted a very different set — one that stands as the most diverse in his career, with the songs straddling the line from the intensely personal aforementioned “Break the Chain” and “Heart Like a Hometown,” to the good-time, windows-down “Straight Line,” the flirty Lainey Wilson duet “Go Home With U” and the heartbreaking “Messed Up as Me,”  which rises to No. 19 with a bullet on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart this week.

Billboard caught up with the multiple Grammy winner via phone, as he talked about the album, the state of country radio, why he sold his master recordings — and what he really thinks about the super-sized albums so many artists are releasing these days. Urban, who has earned 20 career Country Airplay No. 1s, kicks off a 10-show residency at the Fountainebleau in Las Vegas Oct. 4.

Why do you think 615 didn’t come together? 

Look, I’ve never had a theme for a record. I think I was trying to do something — and that’s the death of it all. I was trying to do something instead of just letting it unfold. The only songs that felt like they really flowed were “Messed Up as Me,” “Daytona,” “Break the Chain” and “Heart Like a Hometown.”  So, I thought, “I’ll just take those four and build out a new batch of songs around them — because these songs feel right, but they now need their counterpoint songs to make a cohesive album.”

You made a very deliberate effort when sequencing this album to have the tempos change from each song to the next. You did this in a time that people generally don’t listen to albums from start to finish.

I don’t! But sequencing also is my way of figuring out what songs I don’t need on the record.

Would you like for fans to listen to High all the way through from start to finish? 

I like that it can be played top to bottom and be a good experience. If you want to get in a long car ride, it’s only 40 minutes. But if you just want to put it on and let it go, I hope it gives you a very similar feeling to what it’s like coming and seeing us in concert, if we did a 40- minute set. We’d come barreling out the gate and then we’d go to some other places — but hopefully it would always keep moving in a way in which whatever the very next song is would feel good, from an emotional standpoint and an energy standpoint.

You ultimately landed on 11 tracks, which is short these days! 

I’ve never been a fan of the 25-35 song album. I’m like, “In 2024? Really?” It’s just not my thing. I just wanted to make a strong, concise, cohesive record. And these 11 tracks felt like that to me.

[The super long album] doesn’t do any good in the long run. In some ways, it’s sneaking back to this problem that we had with albums back in the day [where] there was only two good songs on an album with 10 songs on it and the rest was just filler and fans got sick of it. That’s why when iTunes came along and said, “Hey, you can just buy one song,” everyone went, “Hallelujah.” We’ve gone full circle again by doing that sort of manipulating the system with 30 songs. If every one of them is fantastic, great — but they’re not. There’s no way they can be. It’s impossible.

This is your 11th studio album. What do you know about making albums now that you didn’t know earlier? [Urban breaks out into laughter.] Well, maybe given the experience with 615, that’s not a great question. 

It’s moreso a reaffirmation of the way which I prefer to make records, which is a much bigger blend of loose fun and spontaneity. I don’t mean that there isn’t work involved, because obviously there’s huge amounts of work involved. But pretty much every record I’ve ever done has a certain flow about them. The balance that most of my albums have had is a mix of introverted, gravitas moments and musicianship, and then just complete loosey-goose, mindless fun. And balancing those two worlds together has always been the way I prefer to make records. 615 didn’t have the fun factor in there. It was just a bit too earnest.

There are a lot of songs on here about drinking and drinking to excess, including the totally loosey-goosey “Laughing All the Way to the Drank.” As someone who’s been in recovery for a long time, do you ever have pause about not wanting to send a drinking message? 

None at all. Separate to my recovery journey, I’m exactly the guy I’ve always been in my spirit and my edge and devilishness, whatever you want to call it. All that stuff that happened coming up playing in the clubs in Australia, and then paying my dues here — all of that is still a big part of who I am. And so now I sing those songs from having been in those places.

“Messed Up as Me,” I know exactly who that guy is. “Laughing All the Way to the Drank,” I know exactly who that guy is. But in a lot of these cases, I’m also singing to people in the audience. I see that guy in the audience every night. He doesn’t seem to have a lot, but he seems to be the guy having the best time, and he’s a hard-working dude Monday to Friday. He’s my dad. My dad was up at 6 a.m. and he’d be drinking all the night before. So those songs are all places, people I know. They’re real songs in that regard, every one of them.

Lainey Wilson and you duet on “Go Home With U,” which you co-wrote with your buddy Breland. How did that one come about? 

I wrote this song with Breland, Sam Sumser and Sean Small in 2020. That’s one of the quarantine-type songs where everything was shut down, and we so missed being in a packed club with your friends and music and fun, fun, fun. It was never written as a duet, but then I wanted to find something to do with Lainey — because I just knew our voices would sound good together. She loved it and she sang the second verse and sent it back to me. She sent a bunch of options, because she had to change the melody to suit her key, and then just did some ad lib bits and pieces. I just sifted through it all and chopped it and edited it. She just killed it.

What about a full album from you two? 

I would do that. She’s so fun.

In December 2022, you sold your master recordings to Litmus Music, including 10 studio albums and a greatest hits compilation. Why? 

The timing felt good. I really liked  [co-founders]  Dan McCarroll and Hank Forsyth at Litmus, and I felt good about where it was going. So [it] definitely wasn’t just about selling it — “Ka-Ching!”  I wanted to feel good about where it was going and that I could stay involved. I’ve stayed involved with all of those masters — and, hopefully, we’ll get to do that as we keep moving forward.

I kept all my publishing as a writer. I always remember the famous Willie Nelson story about his selling “Crazy” for 50 bucks, and Willie’s attitude was “I needed the 50 bucks and I got it, so I was happy.” There’s something kind of wonderful about that, just keeping it in perspective.

Country fans are now streaming at much higher rates than previously  and country radio is not the only way for fans to discover music. How has your relationship with radio changed? 

I find radio is still very important because, at the end of the day, they’re all ways in which our audience can discover our music. And one of the beautiful things about radio that still exists is you get to just have this flow of songs, so you’ve got it on in your car or your workplace, your home, wherever it is, and you’ve got this flow going.

I love the fact that radio is still a thing and that it’s still as strong as it is. There’s a huge amount of people that still haven’t turned on the tap yet for streaming. There’s a lot of people who do all of it. It’s not necessarily either/or and certainly a lot of my audience is a blend of all of it. I’ve got long relationships with lots of radio people and I’m really grateful for that.

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