March 29, 2009
By ALAN LIGHT
FRANKLIN, Tenn.
KEITH URBAN may be one of country music’s biggest stars, but he and his band didn’t look like much as they settled in for rehearsal in a homey, log cabin-style studio here, not far from his home in the farmlands outside of Nashville. It was a miserable, sleeting day in March, and the six guys were sitting around in T-shirts and jeans, laughing about a bird that got loose in the studio and made a mess of the drum kit.
As they warmed up, though, and ripped through some of Mr. Urban’s biggest hits, like “Stupid Boy” and “Better Life,” the chilly, cramped room began to feel more like an arena. Mr. Urban took a swaggering guitar solo on “You Look Good in My Shirt,” and the drummer Chris McHugh called across the room, “Sounds like you’re having fun over there.”
The day’s lunch break offered a glimpse into Mr. Urban’s offstage life when his wife, Nicole Kidman, stopped by after attending a class with the couple’s 8-month-old daughter, Sunday Rose. Dressed simply in a sweater, jeans and rain boots, she mixed easily with the band and crew and chatted with a reporter about the future of the newspaper industry and a documentary about rodeos in prison. “How about if you handle the rest of the interview?” Mr. Urban said to her with a grin.
Mr. Urban, 41, has a new album, “Defying Gravity,” out on Tuesday on Capitol Nashville. It mostly tells tales of new love, courtship or yearning for lost romance, but the album’s final song reveals more humbling emotions. That song, “Thank You,” is a spare, gospel-inflected offering of gratitude to Ms. Kidman. With lines like “It was hard to keep believing in myself/When all I felt was so much pain and guilt and shame,” it’s the one place on the album where Mr. Urban addresses the troubles of his recent past, which included some time in rehab.
In 2006 it looked like Keith Urban was going to have his biggest year yet. His last album, “Be Here,” from 2004, had spawned five hit singles. With his shaggy good looks, never hidden under a cowboy hat, and ferocious guitar technique, Mr. Urban seemed to have enormous crossover potential; he had even become a fixture in the gossip columns after marrying Ms. Kidman, a fellow Australian.
Then, two weeks before his fourth album release in the United States — his most wide-ranging collection, with the telling title “Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing” — Mr. Urban checked into the Betty Ford Center for substance-abuse treatment.
He now says that the pressure to produce a global blockbuster had become too much for his health, and his music, to handle. “Tackling that challenge in a normal situation would have been difficult enough,” he said, “but where I was, it just a big ol’ keg of dynamite.”
Promotion and touring were potsponed for several months, and though “Love, Pain” still sold about two million copies, it was his first album since he became a major country star that didn’t have a single reach No. 1 on the genre’s charts.
Lounging on a studio couch, he said that after his disappointment passed, he could see the benefits of that difficult time. “Had that record done the expected stuff, I have no clue where I’d be today,” he said. “I needed to be interrupted.”
Judging from “Defying Gravity,” his first album since “Love, Pain,” the break served him well. The album’s mood is joyous, built on Mr. Urban’s signature blend of the modern (drum machines) and the traditional (banjos and fiddles). From the rhythmic nuance of “If I Could Ever Love” to the rave-up “Hit the Ground Runnin’,” each track has an individual feel, yet all of them would fit comfortably on country radio.
“I wanted to get back to the core of my earlier music,” he said. “Simple odes to love, loss, longing — that’s the stuff I naturally do, and instead of second-guessing it this time, I just went with it.”
Dann Huff, his longtime producer, said in a telephone interview that “this time he really knew who he was and who he was trying to speak to.”
Mr. Urban has had three No. 1 singles in the last six months (“You Look Good in My Shirt,” a remake of his own 2002 song; “Start a Band,” a duet with Brad Paisley; and “Sweet Thing,” the first breezy advance from “Defying Gravity”) without the release of a new album. The latest single, the candy-coated “Kiss a Girl,” has already shot to No. 20. And between the album’s summery feel and a lengthy arena tour beginning in May, featuring opening acts like Taylor Swift, Sugarland and Dierks Bentley, it seems safe to assume that Mr. Urban will stay in the spotlight for much of the year.
Make no mistake, the decline of the music industry has finally caught up to Nashville. Carrie Underwood’s new album has sold three million copies — a huge number in today’s marketplace, but less than half of what her 2005 debut sold.
With a new sophistication and a wide variety of influences, though, country stars are now the closest music has to a genuine mainstream. The genre still invests in creating career artists, and multiplatinum singers like Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw and Toby Keith appeal to a much broader swath of music fans than singles-driven acts in the fractured worlds of rock, pop and hip-hop.
Like those stars Mr. Urban is a riveting entertainer who can pack a stadium, and he is also an accomplished songwriter. He’s a girl’s guy and a musician’s musician, with ballads that are sweet but not sappy and rockers that actually rock — but not too hard. In the country-rock tradition, he’s a classic Sensitive Dude.
“I remember sitting in my bedroom, listening to ‘You’ll Think of Me’ and thinking: ‘How does he know what I’m going through better than I do? This song is my life,’ " Ms. Swift wrote in an e-mail message, referring to a 2004 hit from Mr. Urban. “I was 12 at the time. And I know somewhere there was a 35-year-old woman going through a divorce, listening to that same song, saying the same thing. I started writing songs that year, and I only hope that someday I can say how I feel as well as Keith Urban can.”
Born in New Zealand, Mr. Urban grew up in a suburban area of Australia, which has a surprisingly strong country-music tradition. (The Big Country Radio network boasts that it plays “the greatest tracks from Tamworth to Nashville.”) He started performing at a very young age; he recalled with a laugh how he would scoop up used tickets at a dog track near his home and use them for admission to the concerts he held in his bedroom. He listened to country music but played in rock bands, and he even worked as musical director for a cabaret act while still a teenager.
Four songs from his 1991 Australian solo debut reached No. 1 on that nation’s country charts. When he moved to Nashville in 1992, though, things didn’t come so easily. Mr. Urban found work backing up stars like the Dixie Chicks and Alan Jackson, but his own music was too eclectic to resonate immediately on Music Row. “When Keith Urban came out, he was nothing like what country music was used to,” Ms. Swift said.
So Mr. Urban began to rework his music, he said, “simplifying a lot of things, finding out what connects” with an American audience. “At first it felt very limiting,” he added. “But you know, you really should wear your best clothing to meet your girlfriend’s parents the first time, shouldn’t you?”
He formed a band called the Ranch, which cut one album before Mr. Urban went solo in 1999. His second United States release, 2002’s “Golden Road,” was the breakthrough — it sold three million copies and kicked off his steady stream of hit singles. This month the BMI performance-rights organization honored Mr. Urban at a ceremony in Nashville as “Sweet Thing” became his 11th song with more than a million radio plays.
“We often get the comment ‘I’m not that into country music, but that guy Keith Urban is awesome,’ ” said Mike Dungan, president and chief executive of Capitol Records Nashville, in a telephone interview. He added that promotion for “Defying Gravity” was much more focused on digital than is usual for a Nashville artist. “His fan base is very active in that world, so we get a lot more attention from the iLikes of the world, who rarely look at country artists.”
In conversation Mr. Urban is amiable but a bit cautious. He lights up when talking about songwriting or guitar gear but speaks more indirectly about his personal life. That sense of privacy carries over into his writing, though he did say that he has wondered why changes in his life, major matters like sobriety and his baby, don’t figure more prominently in his new songs.
“I guess I just didn’t feel compelled to write about those things yet,” he said. “Maybe they’ll come at a different time. There were a couple of songs that didn’t end up being finished which did touch on them. But I have a very specific area of my life where I work through all of those things, and I haven’t found them coming through that portal of writing music.
“As an artist, sure, I’d like to think there’s some riveting revelation, some deep uncovering of things I’ve come to understand,” he continued, “but it’s hard to do in such a way that it’s not getting trivialized. I just write by what drives me, and what’s driven me the most has been my wife’s love. And as it’s turned out, this is a great year to have a record about love and hope and light.”
He credited Ms. Kidman for pulling him through the turmoil around “Love, Pain” and his relapse into addiction. (He has said that he went through rehab for cocaine abuse in 1998.) “I felt like I absolutely failed making that record, and I was angry at myself for losing focus,” he said.
Once he felt back on track, Mr. Urban seemed to seize every opportunity to satisfy his diverse musical tastes and crossover dreams by collaborating with artists outside of country’s usual comfort zone. At Live Earth in 2007 he and Alicia Keys performed “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones. He recorded with Nelly Furtado and the John Butler Trio, and on this year’s Grammy Awards, he appeared twice: with Al Green, Boyz II Men and Justin Timberlake for “Let’s Stay Together” and alongside B. B. King, Buddy Guy and John Mayer for a tribute to Bo Diddley.
There’s a new eclecticism in country music, he said, making his range no big deal. “This genre has always seen the pendulum swinging, between embracing pop and discarding it, or grabbing at tradition,” he said, “but I think now people are recognizing that country is a very broad genre.
“What I’ve always wanted is that when people ask ‘What music do you play?’ and I say, ‘Country music,’ they say: ‘Oh, yeah? What kind?’ ”
