Keith Urban is grateful for the early years of his career, even the hard years. The New Zealand native moved to Nashville in 1992 from Australia, where he grew up, to pursue country music full-time. While the first years were anything but easy for Urban, with a lot of rejections and disappointments, it was in that era, when he was very much a one-man show, that his tenacity and determination were formed — traits Urban would rely on in the years to come, as his career flourished.

“I feel really, really lucky that I got to start in the beginning like that, schlepping gear and setting everything up, then tearing it down, and finally being able to buy a truck and a little PA system,” Urban tells Variety. “You do that for years and years and years… It builds a deep appreciation for when you finally do get a crew. You know how hard that job is because you’ve done it.”

As Urban began to add more and more people to his team, he graduated from driving a van to leasing a bus, quickly realizing that, although he had many, many talents, driving a large vehicle wasn’t one of them.

“It was early in my career,” Urban recalls with a laugh. “I wondered, ‘How hard is it to drive a bus? It can’t be that hard.’”

“I jackknifed the trailer and put a big dent in it, and in the bus,” he adds. “That was the end of my bus driving days.”

Now that Urban has settled into his role as a superstar, the 55-year-old has a long list of people he employs, people whose talents are essential to the work he does.

“I see myself as someone bringing a skill set to the team, really no different to everybody else and their skill,” Urban reflects. “I sing, I write songs, I entertain. Those are my skills. I can’t tour manage, I can’t mix front-of-house sound, I can’t do production managing. I don’t know how to do those things. But there are people [around me] who have those skills. And when we all work together, that’s what makes us.”

Urban will begin his Keith Urban: The Las Vegas Residency at Zappos Theater at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino on Friday, March 3. He will perform 16 dates as part of his residency, concluding on July 1.

“I resisted a residency in Vegas for a few years. We got asked to come there quite a few years ago,” Urban tells Billboard. “I just didn’t think I would like it because in my head, it just seemed like the word residency just felt like, ‘Oh, you just doing the same show in the same place night after night after night,’ and that just sounded like an episode of Severance to me. But when we saw the Colosseum, I was ‘Oh my God, I think we’ll have a blast in here.’ I was surprised how much I loved it.”

Find music and tour dates at KeithUrban.com.