Cleveland, Ohio — It’s really hard to dislike Keith Urban, not that anyone would want to.
After all, he’s good-looking, with long blond hair and twinkling blue eyes, and speaks in that sweet Aussie accent women adore and men try to emulate. Crikey! What a guy!
Except in 18 years or so of interviews with Urban, we’ve never actually heard the artist who’s at The Q on Thursday night, utter the word “crikey.” Or “g’day.” Or even talk about puttin’ another shrimp on the barbie.
Shoot, maybe this whole thing is a ruse, and Urban is from, oh, Boston.
Well, he said in a laugh-filled phone call from Massachusetts, that’s not as far-fetched as you might think. Seems when he first moved to Nashville in 1992, some of his new neighbors “asked if I was from Boston because I wanted to pahk the caah.”
No, mate. Urban is a Down Under dude, tried and true. And he’s certainly no snooty New Englander. Truth is, he’s the same bar-room guitarslinger who first wowed crowds at Cleveland’s tiny Wilbert’s back in the mid-’90s as the frontman and founder of an alt-country trio called The Ranch.
“This tour is different and yet similar,” said Urban, laughing (again) at the memory of jostling with the patrons at the sweaty Warehouse District club. “There’s a sort of rowdiness in this crowd even though there’s a few more of them.”
A few more. As in, 20,000 or so. But we digress.
To recapture that, Urban designed the stage for this tour so that he and his audience are almost interspersed.
“There’s no real barriers between us and the crowd, with the big burly security guards you often see at arena shows,” he said. His design, which calls for the stage actually to slope into the crowd at the front, looks “like half a spaceship. It allows me to walk down in and out into the audience. . . . They’re literally right there, with their hands on the stage. It feels like a club show.”
Now some artists might be a little wary of getting that close, and truth be told, promoters and Urban’s wife, actress Nicole Kidman, might have some concerns about the potential for a Tim McGraw-esque moment, when a frenzied female fan grabbed McGraw’s, uh, well, grabbed him. Not Urban. But that’s to be expected for a guy whose current album, “Get Closer,” reveals everything about him except whether he prefers the toilet paper flap up or flap down. It’s a trait common in his nine studio albums, which have produced 12 No. 1 songs.
“I struggle a bit with writing too much about my life,” he conceded. But as an artist and songwriter, his work has to come from what’s transpired and inspired his life. That’s everything from the cocaine problem that sent him to rehab to the foundation of his new life Kidman.
The unusual thing, though, is that THE most autobiographical song on the album wasn’t written by Urban. “Without You” talks about a man who’s evolved to realize that the fast cars, guitars and travel that defined his early life are but a flicker next to the fire that fatherhood and a solid marriage to a woman who loves him.
Dave Pahanish and Joe West wrote the tune released earlier this month as the third single off “Get Closer” and became that 12th No. 1 song.
“The fact that two guys wrote this song about me and they didn’t write it FOR me tells me that these songs can strike a chord with a lot of people,” Urban said.
All of whom probably like Keith Urban.
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Tags: Keith Urban, Urban