Keith Urban On Redoing His Album: ‘It Felt Like a Gut Punch’

Photo byCourtesy of the CMA

Keith Urban‘s new HIGH album will be out next month. The 12-track project follows The Speed of Now Part 1, out in 2020. Urban hoped to have another record, 615, out earlier, but it was the album he ended up scrapping, a decision that not only delayed his release of new music, but also led him to HIGH, a masterpiece of an album that Urban is rightfully proud to have created.

“It wasn’t bad. It just didn’t give me the bigger, broader dimension of feeling that I wanted to get from my album,’ Urban recently shared with Everything Nash and other outlets, as part of a virtual media event. “And so I cherry-picked four songs off that album that I loved, and those were ‘Messed Up As Me,’ ‘Daytona,’ ‘Heart Like A Hometown‘ and a song called ‘Break the Chain.’ So those four songs were on that record.

“I took those with me and basically started again, writing and recording, and that took another year and a half,” he added. “The length of time was more about scrapping an album to get to this one.”

Urban, who recalls sitting in his car and crying when he realized he didn’t love 615, says the pain of having to walk away from that project was unlike anything he had ever experienced before.

Photo byCourtesy of the CMA

“That was more difficult than it sounded,” conceded the singer. “I’ve never done it. In all the albums I’ve ever made, I’ve never scrapped an entire album and started again. It felt like a gut punch of my own making, and it would have been easier to be like, ‘This album’s fine. There are some great songs on it. Let’s go, let’s tour, let’s keep the thing going.’ But every part of me just felt like there was a better record in me.”

What Urban thought would be a cohesive, complete record with 615 ended up lacking the energy and creative freedom that Urban has become known for over the last more than 25 years.

“Without getting into a long story about it, the 615, I did it intentionally with this kind of framework idea of what the songs might be, how they would be done, and it would give me focus for an album. And what I discovered was, what I thought would give me focus, gave me limitations. The record was lacking some of the more musical adventure that I like on an album.”

Once Urban set his mind to creating another album, he found a creative freedom that was lacking on all of the tracks on 615. It’s evident in all of the songs on the project.

“When I shook off that title, that album, that concept, everything, and just went, ‘I’m just going to go in the studio with a bunch of buddies, and we’re just going to have a blast and see what happens, ‘Chuck Taylors’ came of that day,” Urban recalls. “And then the very next day, we wrote ‘Straight Line.'”

Photo byCourtesy of UMG Nashville

Urban just released the video for “Go Home W U,” his duet with Lainey Wilson. He also dropped “Wildside” ahead of the release of HIGH. The record will be out on September 20.

Pre-order/pre-save HIGH here. Urban will perform ten shows in Vegas this fall, as part of his HIGH residency. Find all of Urban’s music and upcoming shows at KeithUrban.com.