Keith Urban‘s next album, The Speed of Now Part 1, will be released on September 18. The project, recorded at least in part during the coronavirus pandemic, may seem like an unlikely title while much of the world is still shut down, but for Keith, it made perfect sense.

“I guess the title of the album has been the most asked question I’ve gotten, and that’s one of those crazy art-imitating-life, life-imitating-art moments,” Keith shared with Variety. “The title The Speed of Now came to me last year for multitudes of reasons, mostly just because I felt like everything was just careening almost out of control. Everywhere I went, it seemed like people were going faster, everything was moving faster, life was going faster. So it was a bit of a commentary about the absurdity of where I felt like we were at.

“Fast forward to March and April of this year, where everything just ground to a halt,” he continued. “I was shell-shocked. And I’d said to a couple of friends of mine, ‘I’m going to have to come up with a different album title.’ And they said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Well, this made sense last year.’ They said, ‘Yeah, but the speed of now is very different to what it was last year.’ So I think people will have a different relationship with that title, which took on a whole new meaning.”

Keith admitted he struggled in the early days of lockdown, but came to find his time at home as an unexpected blessing in disguise, which also comes out in The Speed of Now.

“Certainly there’s a huge amount of hope in the record,” Keith said. “My albums have always leaned into the light as much as I can, because it’s how I try and live my life. So I think this record has a lot of buoyancy and a lot of hope in it.”

The New Zealand-born star acknowledged that the impact of COVID-19 initially left him struggling to create anything.

“The truth is, I was quite artistically paralyzed for the first part of lockdown,” Keith conceded. “I unapologetically state that because I had been in the midst of not only playing gigs in Vegas and doing a bit of touring, but going down to studios here in Nashville and recording and having cameras and musicians floating around, and I’m engaged with people everywhere, and all of a sudden that stops. And I’m like, what the hell?

“There’s no touring,” he continued. “There’s no going to other studios. There’s no collaborating with people. And I didn’t know what to do, honestly. I wasn’t very excited to sit in front of my laptop with an acoustic guitar and keep playing a bunch of songs. That just didn’t interest me. After you do it once, you’re like, “Okay. There’s 4 million people doing this on YouTube every day. What are we doing here?” And I just didn’t want to do anything for a good few weeks.”

Keith just released “Superman,” from The Speed of Now Part 1. The record will be released on September 18.