Keith Urban comes to Blue Cross Arena, talks of his past, drugs and music.
It's a long way from Whangarei to Caboolture, and half a world again to Nashville. But as Keith Urban knows, airlines and the Internet are squeezing that world into a manageable ball, a global community.
Still, "I consider myself an Australian," says Urban, calling from his home in Nashville. "I moved to Nashville seven years ago, but I feel very much as Australian as I did 20 years ago."
Indeed, he sounds Aussie enough, although perhaps not rising to the cliché level of Crocodile Dundee. The re-nourishing visits to Australia are frequent, particularly after his 2006 marriage to a fellow Australian, actress Nicole Kidman. As Urban talks, their daughter, Sunday Rose, can be heard in the background. When a 1-year-old kid wants attention, it sounds pretty much the same, whether you're in America or Australia.
Urban — who plays Sunday at the Blue Cross Arena with young country phenomenon Taylor Swift — is now one of the biggest stars in country music. It's music that is thought of as quintessentially American, but no one has ever put a fence around it.
"My parents were big country fans, I sort of grew up in that environment," Urban says. He was born in Whangarei, New Zealand, and when he was 2, his parents moved to Caboolture, in Queensland, Australia.
"It's certainly not as big as it is in the States," he says. "It still struggles a bit. There are not enough outlets."
Urban began playing guitar when he was 6 years old. And if country was big in his household, he was getting out enough to hear the music of Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsay Buckingham. Urban's music might be filed under "country," but like most of the country heard on radio today, there's a great deal of rock influence.
A star of the Australian country scene in the early '90s, Urban began the requisite pilgrimages to Nashville, which fingered him as a session guitar slinger. He played on Garth Brooks and Dixie Chicks albums, and can be seen on the Alan Jackson video for "Mercury Blues." Of, course, Urban had other ideas.
"The transition seemed quick as far as when we finally went from clubs to arenas. But I spent 15 years in clubs," including The Roost in Henrietta, he says. "I've been playing in bands since I was 12. I left school at 15, and that's all I've ever done.
It's a long way from Whangarei to Caboolture, and half a world again to Nashville. But as Keith Urban knows, airlines and the Internet are squeezing that world into a manageable ball, a global community.
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Still, "I consider myself an Australian," says Urban, calling from his home in Nashville. "I moved to Nashville seven years ago, but I feel very much as Australian as I did 20 years ago."
Indeed, he sounds Aussie enough, although perhaps not rising to the cliché level of Crocodile Dundee. The re-nourishing visits to Australia are frequent, particularly after his 2006 marriage to a fellow Australian, actress Nicole Kidman. As Urban talks, their daughter, Sunday Rose, can be heard in the background. When a 1-year-old kid wants attention, it sounds pretty much the same, whether you're in America or Australia.
Urban — who plays Sunday at the Blue Cross Arena with young country phenomenon Taylor Swift — is now one of the biggest stars in country music. It's music that is thought of as quintessentially American, but no one has ever put a fence around it.
"My parents were big country fans, I sort of grew up in that environment," Urban says. He was born in Whangarei, New Zealand, and when he was 2, his parents moved to Caboolture, in Queensland, Australia.
"It's certainly not as big as it is in the States," he says. "It still struggles a bit. There are not enough outlets."
Urban began playing guitar when he was 6 years old. And if country was big in his household, he was getting out enough to hear the music of Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsay Buckingham. Urban's music might be filed under "country," but like most of the country heard on radio today, there's a great deal of rock influence.
A star of the Australian country scene in the early '90s, Urban began the requisite pilgrimages to Nashville, which fingered him as a session guitar slinger. He played on Garth Brooks and Dixie Chicks albums, and can be seen on the Alan Jackson video for "Mercury Blues." Of, course, Urban had other ideas.
"The transition seemed quick as far as when we finally went from clubs to arenas. But I spent 15 years in clubs," including The Roost in Henrietta, he says. "I've been playing in bands since I was 12"My parents could see very clearly that music was gonna be it for me. I had a job in a band on weekends, and they were playing during the week without me. They saw pretty quickly that I could be playing five, six nights a week, and earning good money."
The ride wasn't easy, though, and Urban took some particularly painful tumbles. Early in his Nashville career, addicted to cocaine and heroin, he did some time in rehab. He came out of it with a song, "You're Not My God," in which he refers to cocaine as "medicine that kept me from lookin' in my soul." And just a couple of weeks after the release of his 2006 album Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing, Urban once again entered rehab, this time for alcoholism. Kidman was with him when he checked in, and he spent his 39th birthday at the Betty Ford Center in California.
Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing and his latest album, Defying Gravity, are frequently viewed through the prism of these problems. And Urban admits that, yes, it is probably a fine way to listen to the songs.
"This record was really a record about the solution more than the problem," he says of Defying Gravity. "It's looking back at life. The two years preceding the recording, I received very strong love from my wife and my friends. That was what I was compelled to write about. I was interested in moving forward. It's a record about what's possible. Not seeming so weighted down by earthly things."
Gravity, it is suggested to Urban, naturally pulls things down; so it's the nature of things to fall. People are no different than apples dropping from a tree.
"Love defies gravity," Urban says. "It's looking at life from a different place, not thinking of the limitations. Spiritualism comes in."So he is a spiritual fellow?"Very much so, yes," Urban says. "This is about me being far more in the moment than I have ever been. We just have now. I find myself not being in such a hurry anymore. I have a wonderful marriage, and then our little girl comes along. I am immensely blessed to be at this stage in my life."
But if rehab and a family have offered Urban balance, he quickly points put that the plumb line is trouble. "Balance is never achieved," Urban says, sounding quite Zen-like. "It's just a correction, right? I only know that it needs correcting when it's out of balance."
Of course, when you're a top country star, and your wife is a movie star, we get to watch everything. "I can't say I resent it," Urban says. "It's this particular challenge that is what it is. ... Everybody has challenges worse than mine."
He does his best to keep his privacy. Urban recalls times when he played 110 shows in four months. Now, he's gone on tour for only three or four nights before returning home for three or four. "My wife and I are very, very private, very private people," he says. "We don't go to the opening of everything. We go to dinner, we go to movies, that's about it. I want to be home, it's good for me.
"But I love playing music. That is also good for me ...."
He rides motorcycles, which he calls "a good meditative thing." He reads, too. Currently, he's into All the Shah's Men, "about the origins of our involvement in the Middle East," Urban says. "It's important to ask a lot of questions. Look deeper in certain things that can be presented in a certain way, when you're only hearing one story." That kind of a reading list, and the fact that Urban played at one of Al Gore's Live Earth concerts, raises questions about whether he might hold some progressive views.
"I sometimes drive a '56 Lincoln, that's not the greenest car on the planet," he says. "I like to do my bit. But I never try to preach. I'm drawn to writing about love in particular. I've never been politically driven as an artist."
But we are driven to interpret. And an unfortunate residue of reading Urban's battles with substance abuse into his music is the risk of overshadowing the musical accomplishment of Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing and Defying Gravity. The albums are filled with extraordinary layers of sound, with Urban demonstrating that he's one of the most-complete musicians on the Nashville scene. His six-string banjo mounted on a guitar neck, the "ganjo," is just one of 11 instruments that he plays on Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing. Echoes of the Stones, Springsteen and Mellencamp emerge from Defying Gravity."When you say the word 'country' now, it's changed a lot," Urban says. "Now maybe you think of the Dixie Chicks, even Taylor Swift, but for a long while it was Dolly Parton and John Denver. When I look back at the music I grew up on, in the late '70s, early '80s, it was always contemporary, and that was Ronnie Milsap, Merle Haggard, Glen Campbell. And I don't think there was a cowboy hat in sight.
"The interesting thing about country as a genre is, it's also had the naysayers and the people saying it's doomed, it's not what it used to be. Even Chet Atkins was driven out of town for putting strings on a country record. And now there's a street named after him."
Keith had barely started his show in Glendale, AZ on Saturday night when he paused to say a special "Thank You" to someone in the audience. Apparently, during the show in Sacramento his "...neck went insane and seized up.." on him. After the show they flew to Phoenix and went to see a local Chiropractor. Keith mentioned his name (nice plug for the guy) and said that "... he snapped me around a bit" and made him feel absolutely amazing. Afterwards the doc said to him, "Son, your head wasn't on straight." The place erupted with laughter. Then with perfect comedic timing Keith added, "My father's been telling me that for years."
He wished the guy a "Happy Birthday in 2 days" and continued on with an incredible show. Gotta love a guy who can laugh at himself. 
