Keith Urban plans to mix it up at halftime
Superstar feels right at home in Canada as he prepares to play Grey Cup halftime show
Keith Urban admits he will be “coming in a complete novice” when it comes to Canadian football.
While the Nashville-based, New Zealand-born, Australia-raised country superstar follows the National Football League and supports the Tennessee Titans “by default” as his adopted hometown’s team, he says his knowledge of the CFL is fairly minimal.
So he will not be rooting for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers or Hamilton Tiger-cats when they face off Sunday in Calgary, where he is scheduled to headline the Grey Cup’s halftime show.
“I’m a neutral party,” he says. “Just happy to be there.”
“Happy-to-be-there” is a recurring theme during the amicable singer-songwriter’s interview with Postmedia earlier this week. While he may not be schooled in Canadian football rules, Urban did do some homework to prepare. That included checking out footage of Alessia Cara’s halftime show in 2018 in Edmonton. He also watched Shania Twain’s giddy medley in Ottawa from 2017.
“It was just to get a feel for the mix of ideas: Whether you do a full medley, whether you do any full songs or whether you mix it up a bit,” he says. “And then also it’s just what I want to do myself with the time that we get given. Also, knowing the environment. It’s outdoors, it’s cold.
“You want to keep the energy high, you want a lot of familiarity. My goal is make a connection with everybody in the stadium.”
As with all halftime shows, Urban will have only so much time. So he will offer a medley, focusing on hits from his most recent albums.
“Somebody Like You is from a 2002 album I did, but that’s the furthest one back that I put in the medley,” Urban says. “It’s about a 12-plus medley of a good mix of songs.”
It helps that Urban is among modern country’s most entertaining performers, backed by an impressive catalogue of hits, formidable shredding skills on his Gibson and Fender guitars and a good deal of crossover appeal.
At the time of this interview, Urban had ruled out playing his first Christmas song during the Grey Cup, the recently released I’ll Be Your Santa Tonight.
But he has been toiling away in various studios, preparing new material for an upcoming album. We likely will not hear anything that new on Sunday and Urban seems to be at a loss to explain the direction of his latest effort.
“It’s a good question,” he says. “I don’t know how to answer that for any album I’ve ever done. It’s just new music I’ve been working on slowly for the last year (in Nashville), New York, L.A. — all over the place. It will start coming out next year. I don’t know what else to say about that. I have to just let the music do the talking on that.”
Football has always had a close connection with country music. Still, as with many modern country superstars, Urban has had a knack for pushing boundaries. Like a lot of country fans, he watched Ken Burns’ recent documentary miniseries Country Music on PBS, which traced the genre’s
“People who have the debate about what is country and what isn’t, it’s just a monotonous, pointless conversation because at the end of the day every person decides what they want to call anything,” he says. “Country music in its origin was already a fusion of styles. It’s a fusion of elements that have been tinkered with since the beginning by a multitude of artists that morph it and twist it and contort it and shrink it and take it to places and bring it back. It’s a resilient genre.
“I’d like to get to a point where someone asks ‘What kind of music do you play?’ and I would say ‘country,’ the next question is ‘what kind?’ That’s a much better question.”
Urban is not the first non-canadian artist to entertain CFL fans during the Grey Cup’s halftime show. The Black Eyed Peas played in 2005. Lenny Kravitz headlined in 2007. Imagine Dragons, Fall Out Boy and Onerepublic played in 2014, 2015 and 2016, respectively.
Besides, Urban says Canada has always seemed like a home to him.
His first sold-out stadium performance in Canada was in Calgary. But his Canadian experiences go back to the beginning of his career, 20 years ago. “Right from the very first album I did in 1999, I was up there the next year playing tiny little clubs,” he says. “The very first time I played up there, I just felt like ‘God, this audience really gets what I do.’ Maybe it’s the colonial connection, but they really got what I did and never let go.”