Urban cowboy widens his horizon
Ahead of Keith Urban’s one-off concert in Wellington next month, Chris Johnston reveals what it’s like to go on tour with country music’s Mr Nice Guy.
In the cold concrete tunnels underneath a new ice hockey stadium in small-town Canada, Keith Urban is showing me his Jeep.
He has brought it on tour with him, among the many buses and trucks transporting him, his band and 100 crew on a grassroots tour through Canada’s western hinterland: Calgary, Saskatoon, Prince George, Kelowna and here in Edmonton. The region is one of his prime markets. The stadium is so new the local Oilers ice hockey team – Edmonton royalty – haven’t even played in it yet.
The black Jeep is covered in thick mud. Urban took it out fourwheel-driving in the Canadian forest through dirt and grime and water, finally wedging it on a mound with the wheels raised above the ground. He and his two mates got their shovels out. The jeep was undamaged but its famous driver – one of the biggest crossover rock, pop and country stars in the world – was humbled.
‘‘Four-wheel-drive is great if the wheels are touching the ground,’’ he says, grinning. ‘‘If not, they are as useless as tits on a bull.’’
The pimped Jeep has digital spotlights and ‘‘big-arse tyres’’. It was given to Urban earlier this year by Garth Brooks, the stadium-country figurehead who has sold more albums in the US than Elvis; 136 million of them. Brooks started breaking into the pop charts in the early 1990s and has very much forged the path where Urban, like a faithful understudy, follows.
Urban has sold 13 million albums in the US and won Grammy Awards from 2006 to 2010, yet he hungers for still more success.
His new album Ripcord – already a hit and the foundation of this enormous international tour – features the top players in the songwriting business. They are people who have written or produced songs for Katy Perry, Adele, Bruno Mars. Nile Rogers from 70s disco band Chic – who supercharged one of Urban’s favourite songs, Daft Punk’s Get Lucky – plays on the album. Surly white-suited rapper Pitbull gets a verse in a pitch for Urban’s developing urban market. Pop star Carrie Underwood, who is accompanying Urban on his upcoming tour down under, slays the big duet on The Fighter ,a delicious pop song surely as accessible to the masses through commercial radio as a so-called country singer could ever get.
‘‘I’d like to get to the place one day where I can just make my music in the same way Elton John did,’’ he says. ‘‘I never thought of him in terms of genre. Rock, pop, folk – they are just songs. But I want to get there without losing my country audience because they have been so good to me since day one.’’
Urban – his real surname – was born in Whangarei. He turned 49 in September. The family moved to Queensland when he was 2; his father, Bob, owned a convenience store. Urban admitted for the first time this year that his father (who died last year) was a ‘‘disciplinarian’’ alcoholic.
But his Dad also loved old-time American country music. ‘‘It stayed in my heart, all the songs I first learnt on guitar. But pop radio was a massive influence on me too in the late 1970s when I was about 10. The Eagles, Abba. It had a profound effect on my songwriting because they were universal, simple melodies.’’
He moved to Nashville in 1992 to try to make it in the music business, and struggled, and his dangerous years with alcohol and drugs, including cocaine, began. They ended only after he married A-list Australian actor Nicole Kidman in 2006. Back then he formed a band and played clubs in Florida five nights a week, but eventually, slowly, ‘‘very slowly’’, he started getting a small following in Nashville – ‘‘I didn’t compromise but I did adapt.’’
The couple have homes in Nashville, New York, Los Angeles and Sydney. Nashville is their main home; they have two young daughters, Sunday and Faith. On tour, however, he is alone, but surrounded by hundreds of employees and, on the stage, tens of thousands of keen fans, ranging from children to grandparents.
After the Edmonton show, Urban retreats to his lavish tour bus. He has his own, the band another, plus there are trucks and more buses in Ripcord livery for crew and cast, chefs and a trainer, assistants, management, staff. Urban’s tour manager first worked with Elvis. The head publicist, based in New York, also represents Sir Paul McCartney. Everything always goes smoothly.
It is 11.30pm, midweek. Soon, the convoy will leave for Saskatoon, population 300,000, six hours’ drive away. Urban has always been much more popular in the west in the old semi-rural oil towns in the mountains, where people hunt and fish, than in Toronto and Montreal.
‘‘We usually roll out straight after the gig,’’ Urban says, sitting in the bus lounge with his laptop and bluetooth speaker set up nearby.
He drinks tea and is obsessive about health and fitness after giving up his addictions.
‘‘I’ll come in here and watch the TV or read or whatever. Google stuff. Then crash out in my bunk, try and sleep eight hours. Wake up at the next gig.’’
He takes his band through a two-hour soundcheck in Edmonton to get the start of one song and the middle of another just right. He doesn’t write all of his own songs (he co-writes and coproduces the majority) but he is very much the band leader and the band defers to him. He is the boss.
On this tour – using data from Spotify – his marketing team identify a fan in the next scheduled city who has played his music more than most. Urban tweets the fan with an invitation to come along, and meet him afterwards. His ambition is palpable and it’s clear he’s singleminded about getting more, more, still more songs on the radio all over the world, but within that there seems a generous spirit.
‘‘I am very grateful,’’ he says. ‘‘That’s why. It’s just how I feel. I love playing, and I’m really aware all of it has a shelf life so just give it everything, give it a shot. I love that we can pull all these different kinds of people together under one roof and pretty much agree on something.’’
His shows – and the records he makes now – are in many ways a culmination of all the seismic shifts in country music and pop music since the 90s. The two have moved closer to each other; many country songs at the highest commercial level are expertly written pop songs with pedal steel.
Urban knows he has several different markets – of his own making – and needs to cater for them not separately but as a whole. This is why rapper Pitbull and Nile Rodgers can feature among songs with blue collar, UScentric narratives. One of the singles from Ripcord is John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16, invoking not only God but tractors, and is written by the country music hit factory Smack Songs: ‘‘… I’m a blue jean quarterback saying I love you to the prom queen in a Chevy…’’
Will that translate in Australasia, or anywhere else for that matter? He doesn’t know. But the song – like most of his – are geared toward internationalism, exploiting that sense that pop and country have merged and spawned.
‘‘I make records that hopefully get on country radio in America, but I also have an audience in Australasia who have nothing to do with country, people in Sydney and Melbourne who saw me on The Voice and who listen to pop. It’s an interesting thing to try and make a record I am happy with that has the possibility of working in those places.
‘‘The good thing now is that country has expanded out sonically so far that we can start to bridge genres just a little bit more than we used to be able to.’’ – Fairfax ❚ Chris Johnston travelled to Edmonton as a guest of EMI/ Universal. Keith Urban is scheduled to perform at Wellington’s Westpac Stadium on December 3.