Keith Urban puts a lot of work into every detail of his tour, including the songs he plays. Urban just kicked off his High and Alive World Tour, where he is trying to make sure his fans have a night they will remember forever.
“It’s a lot of trial and error with setlists for me,” Urban concedes. “I agonize over setlists. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube. I spend months and months over setlists, tweaking, coming back to it every couple of days, looking at it. I put a playlist together and Iisten to the songs back-to-back-to-back and just feel the flow from one song into the next – energy-wise, thematically, the key, tempo, everything.
“Does this feel like it should flow out of that? Is the audience gonna be exhausted right about here? This would be a good time for a ballad,” he continues. “This would be a good time to strip it down to an acoustic song and then BOOM right back out of the gate again. Trying to imagine what the live experience is gonna be, and put a setlist together for it … We’ll just keep making changes as the tour unfolds.”
The 57-year-old believes it is more important how each songs sounds, than whether or not the audience knows every word.
“People don’t have to know every song, they just have to be well placed,” Urban explains. “The energy and the theme have to be suitable for that part of the evening in that playlist. We’re a boombox that needs to be playing the right things at the right time, in the right order for them. Know them, don’t know them isn’t as important as is that the right feeling. We’ll find that balance of choosing our moments to go for a ride. ‘Cause all you’re trying to do is create a really great evening, so they go home and they go, ‘God, that was a lot of fun.’”
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For Urban, having too many songs to choose from is a wonderful problem to have, and one that he at one time could have never imagined.
“I’ve got more songs people know. That’s the greatest thing of all,” Urban reflects to Entertainment Tonight. “I came up playing in the clubs. I quit school at 15. I was playing four hours a night, five nights a week at 15. My mom and dad would drive me around. And I’m doing cover songs, and I remember even at that age thinking, ‘Oh man, I wish I could write one song that the audience knew and sang along with like they do with all these songs.’ And so to have that now is surreal.”
Urban not only has new songs on his High and Alive World Tour, but new band members as well, after letting some of his band members go earlier this year. The decision seemed perplexing to some, but to Urban made perfect sense.
“I’ve always just followed the inner voice that says it’s time to make a change, in any area of my life, and sort of just leap. Just take the leap,” Urban shares with Everything Nash and other outlets, during a recent media event. “I don’t always know where I’m going. It’s a little bit like playing live on stage. I don’t always know what I’m going to do next. There’s something exhilarating about living that way, and about performing that way.
“Again, we’ve been really lucky with this band,” he continues, “because we’ve got these five shows in February in Vegas that we got to do as a new band, and get some shows under our belt, before we get into rehearsals for our tour. I’m really looking forward to getting out with the new band, new songs, new production, new everything.”
Find all of Urban’s music and upcoming shows at KeithUrban.com.
Photo Credit: Guitar Monkey Touring