Saturday night, perfect weather, middle weekend of Summerfest — yet another vacant lawn at the American Family Insurance Amphitheater.
Once upon a time, the festival offered free first-come, first-served lawn passes to attendees; instead, Keith Urban played to a modest crowd of nevertheless energetic fans.
After only three songs, Urban paused the show to converse with a couple in the front row who had grabbed his attention with an invitation to their wedding. He proceeded to serenade them, seated at the edge of the stage, with their request of “You're My Better Half.”
This was the most interesting part of Saturday night's show by far.
Other than this acoustic foray, Urban played the same battered-looking Fender Telecaster almost the entire rest of show, more the scrappy guitar hero than his cheesy pop-country reputation would suggest, but rarely in lengthy shows of bravado.
Although Urban sticks to mostly the same songs night to night, he treated Milwaukee to some other unique tidbits. For instance, just Friday he announced a new album, "High" (out Sept. 20), and Summerfest got the world live debut of advance single “Wildside,” a driving Bryan Adams-esque nugget made up like modern pop.
He also welcomed opener Alana Springsteen to the stage to help sing “We Were Us”; she pulled off the parts originally done by Miranda Lambert like an obvious devotee of the song. Urban was flanked by other occasional costars as well — Carrie Underwood for “The Fighter,” Pink during “One Too Many” — but they were only on screens behind him.
He also threw in snippets of Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift tunes as teases, to give the uninitiated reader an idea of who Urban might think his target audience is; based on this gathering, however, his fan base skews at least a generation older. And after decades of Bruce Springsteen and U2 immersion, Urban’s formula of familiar chord progressions and simple words is bound to seep into the masses no matter which genre it purports to stem from.
It wasn’t until late in the set during “Long Hot Summer” that Urban took a real guitar excursion, showcasing some tapping and even incorporating his vocal mic into the brief percussive interlude. It felt obligatory, though; neither Urban nor his fans were here because of technical wizardry.
Urban’s draw is his affable showmanship and voice, and both were in fine form Saturday night. He busted out the acoustic again for “You’ll Think of Me,” concluding it with a faux-exasperated tirade that had the ladies swooning.
“For the broken-hearted, we live to fight another day!” Urban cried, then launched into a crowd-pleasing “Somebody Like You” and a rather anticlimactic “Blue Ain’t Your Color.”
Fans probably knew “Wasting Time” would be the finale, complete with gobs of confetti and a lengthy curtain call. Ten or 20 years ago, this could have been a grand finale of a triumphant weekend; Urban is still a superstar on some level, but he’s starting to lose viability in the vast sea of blandness he helped create.
NEEDTOBREATHE and Alana Springsteen open for Keith Urban at Summerfest
For her opening set, Springsteen (no famous uncles to speak of) primed the crowd with some of the more overtly country songs of the evening. Reading the room, she made sure to play “Look I Like,” evidently a tribute to dudes in backwards baseball caps.
Middle act NEEDTOBREATHE made a bafflingly poor first impression by blasting everyone with steady white light for three minutes while Franz Ferdinand's “The Fallen” played over the P.A. system. After that, though, they played a perfectly competent set of vaguely country-ish pop-rock far more bombastic and earnest than the headlining set but similarly bereft of original ideas.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Keith Urban plays hits, new single for a modest crowd at Milwaukee's Summerfest
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