Keith Urban's got a new tour, a new show and zero interest in acting
"Mr. Urban! Hi!" I said, surprised.
"Oh, definitely call me Keith!" he laughed. "Even my dad hated 'Mr. Urban.' I don't think anyone in the Urban lineage has ever liked 'Mr. Urban.' Sounds way too official!"
Urban's breezy, fun and down-to-earth attitude was on display during our 20-minute chat, and he's taking it on the road this summer. Urban kicked off his High and Alive tour on Thursday night in Orange Beach, Ala., eight months after the release of his 11th studio album, High. And yes, the 57-year-old country music star wants you to feel high and alive — "literally" — when you come and see him.
"It sums up the energy that I like to play with. The energy I want to bring, the energy I want everybody to feel. I'm not a sort of sit-down contemplative, pensive kind of artist. I love firing everybody up and bringing everybody together," he told Yahoo Entertainment. "We're high and alive in '25, it's just tailor-made."
Urban's had 16 No. 1 Hot Country songs, with hits like "Blue Ain't Your Color," "Long Hot Summer" and "Somebody Like You." Although he's been busy building what he likes to call a "playlist," not a setlist, for his upcoming shows, Urban had a surprising response when asked about his approach to this tour.
"It's crazy, I've always been wired to be very — I don't have any sense that I've done anything," Urban said.
To be clear, the New Zealand-born Australian singer has accomplished more than most in his three-decade career. He's won four Grammys, 12 Country Music Awards (including Entertainer of the Year twice) and 15 Academy of Country Music Awards and has sold out arenas all over the world. The list goes on. Hasn't done anything? I let him explain what he means.
"I'm highly aware that I've done a lot of tours and I've made a lot of albums," he laughed. "I get all of that, but I don't think about it. Everything is just very now."
Urban said preparing for High and Alive made him realize he's as driven now as he was when he released his self-titled stateside debut album in 1999. "Even when we went down to rehearsals a couple of weeks ago and I had a massive whiteboard on the stage as I was chipping away at shaping a playlist, it felt like my first tour," he explained.
It's been three years since Urban last hit the road with his band, and while his 2024 hit song "Messed Up as Me" made the playlist, there are several others he broke out for the first time, including covers of Post Malone and Morgan Wallen's "I Had Some Help," plus Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club." He also covered New Radicals' "You Get What You Give" during his encore. Embracing this "blank canvas" feeling means he has no preshow rituals or superstitions.
"I got a lot of new band members. It's a new stage, it's a new production, so there's more things new about it than there isn't. I just feel a sense of freshness and excited energy to get out and play and see what works, what doesn't work, what we have to move and shape, and just be in the moment with the audience," he said. "It always feels brand-new to me."
While Urban is embracing a "blank canvas" professionally, his personal life is happily colorful. In June, he and his wife, Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman, will celebrate their 19th wedding anniversary. Urban gave his family, including daughters Sunday, 16, and Faith, 14, a sweet shout-out earlier this month when he was honored with the Triple Crown Award at the Academy of Country Music Awards.
Urban considers himself a family man, which is something his fans deeply connect with. Being away from home and on the road, though, is something he and Kidman are used to. When asked if they have any two-week rule, or they have a maximum amount of time they can go without seeing each other, Urban said no.
"I've never believed in rules," he said. "It's gotta be a want, you know? And I don't want to be away from my family for too long, so I don't need a rule. I'm really lucky that I get to tour the way I do, which is kind of three shows in a row, and then three to four days off. Then three shows in a row. It's pretty rare to even be gone for two weeks. It's fortuitous where Nashville is [located] in that it's a fairly decent flying time to a lot of places."
Urban thrives on connecting with his audiences to take them on an unforgettable ride. Part of the reason he has such a passionate fan base isn't just because of the songs themselves, but because of his songwriting, which touches on themes like love, loss and redemption. His self-reflective lyrics typically mirror where he's at in his phase of life.
"I think I've gone from writing about things I'd like to experience to being able to write from experience," he explained when I asked how his songwriting has evolved.
"A lot of my early songs were imagining what it would be like to have a particular feeling, to be a particular person because I wasn't that person but wanted to be," he continued. "These songs probably just have more depth to them. And there's just more things to write about. It doesn't have to be family, it's just experience. It's losing parents. It's friends who have been in your life for a long time. Moving. Things changing in life. New seasons. Chapters coming to a close, and new ones opening that are equally as exciting, if not more so."
Urban categorizes his current chapter as "unfolding." Given all he has on his plate in 2025, that seems fitting.
This fall, Urban will headline the new country music competition series The Road on CBS. Unlike other singing competition shows, this one puts aspiring singers straight on tour, as contestants will join Urban onstage this summer and trade off opening for him. The series, which doesn't have a premiere date as of yet, is executive produced by Blake Shelton and Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan.
This isn't Urban's first stint on reality television: He was a judge on American Idol from 2013 to 2016 and on the inaugural season of Australia's The Voice in 2011. When asked if he's taking any learnings, good or bad, from those experiences to The Road, he said it's wildly different.
"I don't know if I took any specific things from those other shows other than — because this show is not really not like those in so many ways," he explained. "It's quite extraordinary what Blake and Taylor envisioned for this thing. To put it back into this real-world environment — being in clubs where you don't have hair, glam, a stylist and all this noise and nonsense. You've got your talent, your drive, your ambition and you've got a stage and a house band. You've got two songs, one original and one cover, and you've gotta grab this audience that hasn't come to see you. This audience has come to see me play at the end of the night, and you gotta grab 'em."
Urban said the "do or die" feeling is really what it's like when you start out in the music industry.
"I came from another country. Having the odds stacked against you is something I've spent my life having to continue working through," he added. "I'm not comparing my journey to anybody else's. It's just aspiring to be the best you can always be, staying curious, passionate, hungry and never giving up. Staying the course is always key, and in the end, I think it works."
Urban also had a blast working with Shelton, who he called a "unique guy." "I love being around his energy. He's just funny," he said.
As for Sheridan, who is known for creating the Yellowstone universe, Urban admires his talent — but has no interest in throwing on a pair of ranching boots.
"Absolutely not," Urban said. "I've never had any interest in acting. I just bought a studio here in Nashville because that's my passion. I don't have any hobbies. I just love playing music. I love being in the studio. I love creating, I love recording."
For what it's worth, there's zero pressure from his wife to get on set. Kidman recently said in an interview that she and Urban have no desire to work together. ("We're together in life, so we don't need to do our show together," she told People. "Our life is a show.")
"I've been on enough sets now to know that that's absolutely not anything I ever want to do," Urban laughed. "It's not for me!"
Right now, it's curiosity in the studio that's fueling the artist.
"That's literally what powers me forward and drives me and has always driven me, is curiosity about writing songs, playing, putting on a show, connecting with an audience," he said.
"I don't know if you can cook, but I can't cook," Urban continued, 'but I realize that's what I do in my head. I hear ingredients, and I imagine what those things together might taste like to my ears. Having a studio now gives me the chance to really explore those kinds of opportunities to blend things that I hear and see what goes together. ... I'm constantly curious to explore musical art, which [is what] my life is."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Yahoo
One of Most Disturbing NYC Thrillers of the 1980s Has Been AWOL — Until Now
'Somewhere in this city, possibly among these people, is a man… so close to the edge that when he breaks, it could change your life forever.' The city is New York at the end of era, poised between being the place that a sitting President implied should 'drop dead' and a metropolis on the verge of becoming a coked-up playground for Wall Street's nouveau riche. The people are the everyday men and women that populate it, from working stiffs to fatcat bureaucrats. The man on the edge is named Gus Soltic, though his neighbors in the boogie-down Bronx call him 'the Mole Man'; he works in the sewers under Central Park. Spoiler: He will break. And while he won't necessarily change your life, Soltic is about to drag an ex-cop and his teenage kid through hell. More from Rolling Stone 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' Needs a Sharper Hook '40 Acres': Danielle Deadwyler Is the Postapocalyptic Action Hero We Deserve Michael Madsen Was the Tough Guy's Tough Guy The movie is Night of the Juggler, and if you were lucky enough to catch this thriller when it first hit theaters in 1980 or played on premium cable channels for a few scant years afterward, then you probably remember it. Or at the very least, you can recall Cliff Gorman's uniquely unsettling take on the urban psychopath; James Brolin at the peak of his bearded, Brawny-mascot hotness; and the way that the movie portrayed NYC in all its funky, late Seventies state of decay. Like many works from that fertile age of grindhouse-friendly filmmaking, this adaptation of William P. McGivern's novel (originally titled Red Alert Central Park, a far better pulp-fiction handle) fell through the cracks in terms of distribution rights and home-entertainment-format updates. Apart from rare revival screenings, it's been near impossible to see it outside of bootlegs for almost 40 years. That Kino Lorber has finally managed to give this cult classic a 4K restoration without sacrificing its sense of Forty-Deuce grit — and another theatrical run before a Blu-Ray release this fall — is a miracle. You could not ask for better throwback viewing than this on a hot August night. Once upon a time, Brolin's Sean Boyd wore a badge and kept Manhattan's mean streets safe. Then he pulled a Frank Serpico and exposed the corruption of his fellow police officers, and suddenly, he's part of the wave of NYPD layoffs. Now he drives a truck and dotes on his daughter Kathy (Abby Bluestone), who's turning 15 today. Dad got them both tickets to the ballet that night, but she's still got to go to summer school. Despite the fact that Boyd is bushed after a graveyard shift, he's willing to walk her to school. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, Soltic is finishing up his breakfast. After the single most menacing splattering of ketchup in the history of American cinema, he changes out of his uniform and stakes out on apartment on the upper west side. His target is the daughter of a real-estate developer who screwed his family over many years ago. Now the Mole Man wants to make them suffer. The plan is to kidnap the rich guy's kid and demand a hefty ransom, though you feel like he's the kind of sicko who's not willing to stop there in terms of criminal behavior. Due to the fact that Kathy is wearing nearly the same outfit as the developer's teen daughter, Soltic accidentally grabs her instead and throws her into the station wagon he's just boosted. Sean quickly sprints after them. What follows is one of the great unsung chase scenes of late-period New Hollywood, a 10-minute sequence in which our hero pursues the bad guy through upper Manhattan, aided by a Puerto Rican cabbie played by Mandy Patinkin — yes, that Mandy Patinkin. The cat-and-mouse game briefly transitions to the subway at the 86th Street stop before they both surface above ground again. Many cars are crashed. This sequence alone makes the film worth seeking out while it's on big screens. (It kicked off its theatrical run this weekend in NYC at the IFC Center, and per Kino, will expand to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, Atlanta, and Toronto, among other cities, starting in September.) Brolin then spends the remainder of the movie using every one of his old connections and the help of various average New Yorkers to track down his missing teen. Despite the fact that the actor broke his foot early in the shoot (which led to original director Sidney J. Furie leaving the project and Robert Butler taking the reins), Brolin is in a state of constant motion. There is so much running in this film that they could have easily called it Day of the Jogger. Despite the fact that Night of the Juggler hit theaters in June of 1980, it's very much a movie of the 1970s, and is part of a wave of films that painted New York as a sort of Armageddon-in-progress that Pauline Kael dubbed 'Horror City.' Everything appears to be breaking down and/or covered in a patina of sleaze. The outer boroughs look like war zones, ethnic gangs run rampant, midtown is littered with massage parlors and peep shows, and the police have their hands full with militants and double-digit murder rates. The movie's climax takes place in the sewers, which somehow seem cleaner than the city perched on top of them. 'Y'know, I got a feeling it's gonna be another goddamned New York day,' one exasperated police lieutenant says early on, and the film spends the rest of its running time doubling down on his assertions. Welcome to the NYC that spurred conservative Middle America's nightmares. That aforementioned line, by the way, is spoken by Richard Castellano, better known as Clemenza from The Godfather — and he's just one of the ensemble of extraordinary character actors from the era that help make this richly rancid time capsule rock hard. Dan Hedaya plays a cop still pissed at Boyd for the whole informing thing, and thinks nothing of opening fire on his former peer with a shotgun in the middle of a crowded Bryant Park. Sully Boyar, a.k.a. the bank manager from Dog Day Afternoon, shows up as administrator at a canine pound. (He's graduated to afternoons spent with actual dogs!) You might recognize a street preacher as the same guy who played a doctor in The Exorcist; that's Barton Heyman. And while the casting of Patinkin as that heavily accented cabbie is definitely… let's call it 'a choice,' the movie also hands a plum role to the great Puerto Rican actor Julie Carmen, who's graced everything from John Cassavetes' Gloria to The Milagro Beanfield War to Tales of the Walking Dead. But Night of the Juggler is really Brolin and Gorman's show. And while the movie certainly makes the case for the former tying with Burt Reynolds for Most Virile Screen Presence of the era, it's the latter who turns this class-conscious kidnapping potboiler into one of the more disturbing thrillers of that transitional sociopolitical moment. An actor who graced The Boys in the Band and All That Jazz, and who won a Tony for playing Lenny Bruce in the original Broadway production of Lenny, Gorman is both the secret sauce and source of the movie's diseased mojo. His Soltic initially courts sympathy with his tale of being economically screwed over by the city's elite; this character's racist views and growing, extremely unhealthy attraction to Boyd's kid, however, quickly ixnays any notion of being on his side. There's no question that this man is a psychopath, and Gorman leans into the ugliness. Yet he also gives him a sense of someone who's been tainted, warped, left behind by the land of milk and honey. Back then, this version of God's Lonely Man was easily recognizable as an outlier. Now Soltic would be recognizable as someone spewing hate and violence among communities of like-minded folks. It's a metastisized have-not archetype with a grudge that has not gone away. Only the horror-city landscape has changed. Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Best 'Saturday Night Live' Characters of All Time Denzel Washington's Movies Ranked, From Worst to Best 70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century Solve the daily Crossword
Forbes
3 days ago
- Forbes
Solar Gardens Offers A Greener Tomorrow With A Board Game Today
Most games set in the cities of the future are cyberpunk in nature. They see cities as brutal dystopian fortresses. But the latest release from Darrington Press sees cities as an important part of the process to make our world to a better place. Solar Gardens puts the concept of urban sustainability into a tile laying game. Players compete to build the most lovely rooftop garden at the top of their futuristic skyscraper. While the gardens in the game built by the players are big and forward looking, the original design started as a small look to the past. 'I first played Alex's original prototype when it was a Zen garden game,' said Eric Slauson, co-designer of Solar Gardens. 'It was much more zoomed in. A little tiny space that you were building.' 'It was koi ponds, little pagoda statues, things like that,' said Alex Culter, co-designer of Solar Gardens. 'It was very peaceful and pastoral like a lot of tile laying games are. But I knew at some level it was a theme that would get bumped up or replaced. The theme was kind of a placeholder. We knew that once we found a publisher that felt very strongly about the mechanics that we could shape the theme in whatever direction we wanted to go.' FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder They found Darrington Press, who not only made a deal to publish the game but also make it one of their big debuts at Gen Con. While the company has been getting rave reviews for Daggerheart they are making moves into the board game space with titles like Queen By Midnight. Even with their non-RPG games, Darrington Press wants to tell stories. 'I was familiar with their general vibe, world building and positivity around the table,' said Slauson. 'I thought this would be a good fit. We sent them the zen garden version. They had a blast playing it in the office. Of course, everyone who plays it does. They came back with 'what about elevating the scope a little bit? What if we're thinking about sustainability? What if we're thinking about community gardening?' That was the first prompt. What can this look like in a larger sense? I'm a theme first designer. I love theme, I love world building. So I ran with that and Alex let me change the prototype.' Tile laying games offer communal experience that's competitive but also can feel cooperative. Everyone is trying to build something together but also trying to make the best possible version of the thing. With one tile to pick or pass every turn, there's a risk that keeps everyone's attention during the game. 'The most fun aspect of this game is the push your luck [element],' said Cutler. 'Every single turn, every single player is making a choice. Whether you're the lead-off player or you're in the last position, you're still making choices about what's coming to you. Your valuation is changing every single turn of every single round. Is this tile good for me? Is this tile good for someone else? I think it adds a lot of layers to the game. I think it's a game that can be played with a group that's very friendly and calm. But also, the first time I ever played the game with Eric was at Gen Con with a large group of people.I have never heard more sailor mouthed crap talking at one table.' 'Even though it's a tile layer and you're doing the drafting and the placement you do in a lot of other dry, Euro kind of games,' said Slauson, 'because it's so social, because everyone interacts every tile someone drafts you care about. Everybody is watching what everybody else's board is doing. There are so many moments of reaction. We found that people who play in a more reserved style can't help but cheer.' In addition to the theming, Darrington Press is making sure each copy of the game sold helps sustainability in the real world. Solar Gardens is made of biodegradable, plastic-free materials and uses paper stickers to hold the game box together in transit. As part of the National Forest Foundation's Sapling Program, each copy sold helps fund reforestation efforts in U.S. national parks. 'No matter how cutthroat [you are] as a player, you're still being benevolent,' said Slauson. 'I showed you! I built a perfect garden for society!' Solar Gardens is available directly from Darrington Press and online retailers like Amazon.
Yahoo
06-08-2025
- Yahoo
Tkachuk Family Announced As NHL 26 Deluxe Edition Cover Athletes
Matthew, Brady, and Keith Tkachuk will grace the deluxe edition cover of NHL 26. A five-time All-Star and 1997 Maurice Richard Trophy winner, Keith Tkachuk will appear on the cover in a St. Louis Blues jersey. He played 543 regular season games for the Blues over parts of nine seasons and currently serves as the team's Director of Recruitment. The last Blues player to be on the cover was Vladimir Tarasenko in NHL 17. A four-time All-Star and captain of the Ottawa Senators, Brady Tkachuk becomes the first Senators player to appear on the cover of an EA NHL game. Craig Anderson was available as a custom cover on NHL 14, and Jason Spezza was on the cover of NHL 2K8. Matthew Tkachuk was announced at the standard edition cover athlete on Aug. 4. The father-son trio have combined for 969 career goals. NHL 26 is set to release Sept. 12, those who pre-order the deluxe edition get access Sept. 5. For more NHL Gaming news make sure you bookmark The Hockey News Gaming Site or follow our Google News Feed. Photo Credit: EA SPORTS NHL
