Keith Urban’s rehearsal space is tucked away on a quaint street in a nondescript building in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Nashville. Just inside, employees loyal to Urban for years line both sides of a long, rectangular table. Urban, wearing a black t-shirt with “carcaine” printed across the chest in large, white block letters—a nod to his affinity for anything with wheels—strolls through a door at the back of the room. He’s smiling, having just finished rehearsal, and starts to greet people as his phone rings. Urban glances at the screen.
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“It’s my wife,” he says, answering the phone and swiftly walking out the front door into the stifling July heat.
A few minutes later, he returns, excited to talk about his new album, High, which will be available Sept. 20. Urban is aware that, given his history with addiction, the title is a talker. He’s amused and thinks it’s perfect. High is Urban’s first new album in nearly four years, and the word appears in many of the album’s 12 songs. He says, “High kept popping up everywhere.”
Now perched on a stool surrounded by music gear and road cases, Urban says he thinks high is a great and universally understood word.
“It has so many different interpretations to people, but it’s a place of utopia,” he tells American Songwriter. “It’s a place to try and get to. We all agree on that. We just may have different ways of getting there, but it’s definitely the destination.”
Urban co-wrote half of the songs on the album and co-produced the collection. The word “high” embodies the album’s spirit in that he has always leaned into believing there is hope, even in hopeless situations. He says he tries to find a crack of light somewhere to keep moving toward.
“High, for me, represents that in a new way,” he shares. Urban explains that if he’d released an album called High at the peak of his addiction battle in the 2000s, it would have had a different meaning. But he’s laughing now.
“I loved the uncomfortable humor of it, too,” he laughs. “Have you heard Keith Urban’s High? It’s just such a perfect phrase. I like all the playfulness of it.”
High could just as easily been called Round 2. Urban teamed up with longtime and frequent collaborator, producer Dann Huff, to create a Nashville project he planned to call 615. The singer/guitar slinger only wanted to use Nashville writers and record in Nashville studios. Typically, Urban is a free-flowing creator, and 615 was his first attempt at trying to craft something with a framework. His song “Brown Eyes Baby,” written by Morgan Wallen, Josh Thompson, Rodney Clawson, and Will Bundy, was meant to be the lead single from 615. The song didn’t even earn a spot on High. Urban just let it stand as a single release.
His vision didn’t work out, and that had never happened to him before.
“Sometimes it takes doing a bunch of stuff and then having the objective stance to look at it and go, ‘I thought this was where I was going, but this is dictating where it’s going to go,’” Huff says. “I think that’s what happened on 615. I think I’m a really good mirror for him, and there’s no dictating to him who he is.”
A few songs from 615 carried over to High: “Daytona,” Urban’s current single “Messed Up As Me,” “Heart Like a Hometown,” and “Break The Chain” were on 615. Urban says that when he heard 615 as a whole, he recognized the album lacked the variety and texture he’s known for bringing to projects. So, he took those four songs, used them as tentpoles, and crafted High around them.
He threw himself into the playfulness of songwriting in the studio with new collaborators. While Urban has performed with bass player Jerry Flowers for most of his career, the two had never written a song together. He’d also never written with Chase McGill. When Urban, Flowers, McGill, and Greg Wells teamed to write, they crafted the bouncy love songs “Chuck Taylors” and “Straight Line” during back-to-back writing sessions.
Urban gets animated when remembering the writing session for “Chuck Taylors,” recalling that most of it happened before the men were in the room together. Urban wanted to bring an idea into the write, but as he drove to Berry Hill for their first session, he still had nothing.
Halfway between his house and the recording studio, a flailing single-note bass chord progression came to him. Urban had the melody fully formed when he arrived at the studio. While he had no lyrics, the music he heard in his head in his car became the chorus of “Chuck Taylors.”
He entered the room, grabbed a bass, and asked Wells to give him a four-four drum feel. He played bass and sang the melody for the men, and McGill mentioned he had an idea for a song called “Chuck Taylors.” Urban asked what the song was about, and McGill read him the chorus.
“He had no melody or anything, either,” Urban says. “As he was reading it, I went, ‘I think this fits.’”
It was up in the air / Are they going to make it / Never come down / Never gonna come untied / You and I / Are still hanging in this / Just like Chuck Taylors on a powerline
Urban took the lyric, played the bass, and sang the melody he just walked in with.
“It was like hand-in-glove,” Urban recalls. “The lyrics and the melody were meant to go together, and we were off and running from there.”
With those songs in hand, Urban thought his new album had the missing spirit from 615.
“It felt like, ‘Oh, here we go,’” he says. “I thought, ‘Gosh, if I could find more songs that have that mix of familiarity and newness, this is what I’ve been missing on the previous record.’”
Huff believes achieving the delicate balance between familiarity and uniqueness makes High an undeniable triumph for Urban. He calls the familiarity “seeds,” explaining that they serve as a bridge for fans to jump from their favorite existing Urban songs to embracing his new material.
“It’s moving forward lyrically and melodically, and these are currently written songs, but they also have just little markers in them, little nods to the historical path,” Huff adds. “I’ve watched my dear friend suffer that because I think the internal battle he always faces is he doesn’t want to become an act that just can’t find new ground. I think he has to become comfortable with some of that.”
Huff co-produced five songs on High and believes that Urban crafted a well-balanced album that captures his journey over the last three or four years.
“Break The Chain,” which first appeared on the abandoned 615 project, reflects more than Urban’s last four years. The deeply personal song explores the singer’s painful relationship with his father. The lyrics detail how the elder Urban’s addiction struggle made the singer want to be a better husband to his wife, Nicole Kidman, and father to their daughters, Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret.
Urban co-wrote and co-produced the song with Marc Scibilia, another first-time collaboration. Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Publishing Group Nashville, Troy Tomlinson, told Urban about “this kid Marc Scibilia” and said he thought the two of them would “hit it off.” Urban called Scibilia, who then invited the singer to his in-home studio. When he got a day off from the tour, Urban went to Scibilia’s house. He walked in and met him for the first time. Scibilia has a Del Oro 1930s acoustic guitar with a rubber bridge and flat wound strings.
Urban thought it was funky. He picked it up and played a riff, and it felt beautiful. As Urban played, Scibilia grabbed a mic, put it in front of him, and started recording.
“God bless him,” Urban says. “That’s what you should always do. Just start recording.”
In this case, the melody came fast, and so did the lyrics. As Scibilia added keyboards and other elements to the track, Urban picked up a pen and legal pad, sat on the couch, and began writing.
“They just kept coming and coming and coming,” he recalls. “And I get to this second verse about my dad, and I just start bawling my eyes out on this couch at this complete stranger’s house. I was sitting over there just crying like I was in therapy. He looks over at me and just says, ‘Must be true.’ And then went right back to work again.”
Urban says Scibilia’s comment was perfect because it kept him in the moment. He kept writing until he finished the lyrics, grabbed a mic, and recorded the vocal.
“It’s just one of those beautiful moments of a song meant to come,” he says.
I’ve been out here on my own now for way too long / Fighting my own battles with my demons with the way that I was raised| Never safe / And never sure / What made him so mad at the world / Mad at me / I was just a kid / I won’t do the same / And it’s not too late / It’s never too late / To break the chain
Urban values his privacy, and “Break The Chain” is one of the most personal songs of his career. However, he’s eager to share it because he’s been sober for a long time and has worked through many difficult emotions stemming from his father’s alcoholism.
“The thing that helped me the most in recovery was being able to separate the addict from the person,” he says. “My dad as a person was amazing—very, very smart, very talented, very creative, always smelled good, always looked good. He’s just a badass. He’s cool as hell. But he was an addict, so his addict was not nice and not a good way to be raised.”
He describes his relationship with his father, who died in 2015 following an extended cancer battle, as a “weird, conflicted, love-hate relationship.”
Urban says his relationship with his father is better now that he’s gone but that he’s still ultimately trying to reconcile their relationship in some way.
“It was hard for that generation to get sober,” Urban says. “No excuses, but instead of putting all my effort into all of that, I’d rather put my effort into what I could do differently. I’m a flawed individual. I still make big mistakes, but I’m trying to raise our kids differently.”
Urban doesn’t know if his father would appreciate “Break The Chain.” As complicated as his father was in the throes of alcoholism, Urban is sure he wouldn’t be where he is without both of his parents.
“I love my mom,” he says. “I’m a product of both of them, very, very much. My mom is very friendly and outgoing, and I wouldn’t be an entertainer if it weren’t for my mom. I wouldn’t have the artistic thing that my dad had. He is just a wonderful artist with an unfulfilled life. I want to break that chain and try and manifest the life that he would’ve had had he had been sober.”
SIDEBAR – A Shining Star
Keith Urban has charted 24 No.1 songs and 38 Top 10 hits. The country star and pop culture king has won four Grammy Awards, 13 CMA Awards, and 15 trophies from the Academy of Country Music.
However, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame eluded him—until this summer.
In June, Hollywood Chamber of Commerce President Steven Nissen revealed Urban was an honoree along with George Strait, Fantasia, Depeche Mode, Los Bukis, The B-52s, Green Day, The Isley Brothers, Busta Rhymes, WAR, and the late Prince. The singers will have two years to schedule their ceremonies. While Urban doesn’t yet know when his star ceremony will be, he’s thankful for the recognition.
“Hopefully (I’m) worthy of it,” he says. “It’s a huge honor. My wife has one as well, so it’s kind of amazing to be in that long, long tradition of all kinds of people that have been honored that way.”
Urban says the landscape is full around wife Nicole Kidman’s star, so he doesn’t think their stars will align. However, he’s “very, very grateful.”
“I spent a lot of time (in Los Angeles) doing American Idol and other things,” he says. “That feels like a huge honor for all the other creative things that I’ve gotten to be a part of over there, in addition to writing songs and playing music.”
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