Keith Urban is giving his fans a sneak peek of his next album. The New Zealand-born singer shared a clip of him in the studio on social media, simply captioning the video with “hi!”
Urban has said he is eager to share his new album, which he finished last year, with the rest of the world.
hi !
Posted by Keith Urban on Tuesday, January 30, 2024
“It’s so frustrating sitting on so much,” Urban told Access Hollywood. “It is a whole album of new music that I’m jonesing to get out, but it won’t be until early across mid to next year.”
Indeed, Urban’s next set of tunes was a labor of love. The father of two created, and then scrapped, almost an entirely new project, when he realized it wasn’t the way he wanted it to be.
“I started working on an album at the beginning of last year,” Urban told the Associated Press in August. “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.”
Now happy with the finished product, Urban admits at the time it was devastating to realize he needed to start over.
“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 shared. “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 been known to seamlessly blur genres in his music, a bold move he credits to John Mellencamp.
“I love John Mellencamp,” Urban said on Criss Angel’s Talking Junkies podcast (via Taste of Country). “Huge John Mellencamp fan. And he did a record called Lonesome Jubilee. Prior to that, he’d had Hurts So Good, more straight rock, and then through Scarecrow, he brings in some fiddles and a few little organic things. Then he does Lonesome Jubilee and he’s got accordion, fiddle, acoustic guitars, but he’s got this rock rhythm section still.
“It was the collision of all these things that, prior to going to that concert that night, I’d been like ‘Man, am I country or am I rock? I don’t know what I am, what I’m supposed to be doing,’” he continued. “I went to that concert. He walked out onstage. The band was phenomenal. And I saw and heard all that fusion and it was literally like a light went off. I was like, ‘I get it. Don’t think about genre or anything. Just…pull all the things you love, your soup, man, your gumbo, and make your gumbo.’”
Find music and tour dates at KeithUrban.com.