Keith Urban will have a new album out, and soon. The father of two reveals he is almost done with his next record, which is in the final stages of being ready for him to share with the world.
“I’ve got another single coming out in the next couple of months; we’re trying to choose one of these particular three right now,” Urban tells the Associated Press. “Most of the album, I’d say, is finished. I think I’ve got basically one more song to record from the ground up, and then a whole bunch of others that just need to be mixed. I’m in the final stages of landing the plane right now. An album will come out sometime next year.”
The new project isn’t at all what Urban had originally planned on releasing. But after he finished what he thought would be the follow-up to The Speed of Now Part 1, the New Zealand-born singer realized it wasn’t the album he wanted to make.
“I started working on an album at the beginning of last year,” Urban recounts. “I spent the better part of the year in and out of the studio while I was touring, only to get to probably February of this year and sort of look at it all and feel like it really wasn’t a group of songs that was speaking to me. There was another album in me, I guess. It was a weird feeling. I actually never had that happen with a record, where I bailed on two-thirds of it. I probably kept about three out of those 12 or so songs.”
While Urban admits it was daunting at the time to consider scrapping what he had poured so much of his time and energy in, he is also grateful to be proud of all of the tracks on his next set of tunes, even if it was an arduous task to get there.
“It was the worst feeling of like, ‘Okay, it’s back to the drawing board. I got to get in there and start writing some songs,'” Urban concedes. “And so really from February all the way through to now, the whole record just took a whole different direction when I had time to write. It was the missing heart of the body of songs that I’d recorded. And everything started to pop, and all three of the next single contenders we’ve got right now, I’m a writer on all three of them.”
Urban has more to look forward to than just a new album. The 55-year-old will be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame this fall, alongside Kix Brooks, David Lee Murphy, Casey Beathard and Rafe Van Hoy,
“To be recognized as a writer is extraordinary, because I’ve always loved songwriting,” Urban says. “When I started really writing poetry in school, and I started writing songs just out of a desire to not be stuck, always singing somebody else’s song, playing in cover bands, and realizing “This is going nowhere for me. I want to write my own songs.”
Urban will resume his Keith Urban: The Las Vegas Residency at Zappos Theater in Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in November. Find music and tour dates at KeithUrban.com.