Keith Urban says 'High' is about order and chaos, with songs about love, life and his late father

[September 20, 2024]  By MARIA SHERMAN

NEW YORK (AP) — Decades into one of the most consistent careers in contemporary country music, and you'd think Keith Urban has this whole album thing worked out. But his 11th studio album, “High," out Friday, was no walk in the park.

It's been four years since 2020's “The Speed of Now Part 1,” and in that time, Urban wrote another record, “615,” and scrapped it.

"It’s the only time I’ve ever gone into the studio with a very clear sort of intent to make a particular kind of record, that had focus. I started to wonder if my musical adventurousness on records needed a little more discipline," he laughs. “The end result was this thing that was just a bit linear. It was just a lot of the same kind of thing, and it was missing the spirit of the curiosity of the edges and places that I’m interested in exploring and going to.”

So, instead, Urban returned to what he knows best — fluidity in the studio, unbeholden to genre limitations, the magic of uninhibited songwriting — channeling one of his favorite albums, the New Radicals' 1998 alt-rock classic “Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too," with its oscillating qualities. One song has impeccable structure and recording, the next is “stream of consciousness, random, I don't even know what it is,” he says. “The album had this beautiful flowing energy of organized and chaos... The spirit of most of my albums has contained some element of that.”

As does “High” — from the sexy, playful duet “Go Home W U,” co-written with BRELAND and featuring Lainey Wilson, the road trip romance of “Heart Like a Hometown” and the honky-tonk headrush “Laughin' All the Way to the Drank” to the not-so-indirect ballad “Love Is Hard," and the slow-burn “Dodge in a Silverado.”

Tempo changes punctuate the album, mirroring its emotional range. The first gut punch arrives early: the jovial "Straight Line" hits like a rowdy night, “Messed Up As Me” provides the sobering light of day.

For Urban, those sensibilities make up life. “I’ve got a dutiful, responsible, reliable side. And I’ve got this animalistic, wild, reckless, irresponsible, ‘what does this button do?,’” he says. “The spirit of those two things is very much a part of who I am, and this album hopefully captures that.”

Keith Urban performs during the 2023 CMA Fest on Friday, June 9, 2023, at Nissan Stadium in Nashville, Tenn. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)

To express that specific human experience, the sequencing of “High” was crucial. It had to end with “Break the Chain,” a soulful rumination on dysfunctional family dynamics.

“It's a lot to do with my dad and being born into a family with an alcoholic father and the challenges that come with that,” he says of the song. “My job is to now maybe break that chain and do something different. But I never mentioned alcohol in the song once because I didn’t want the song to be about that. It’s really about behavioral patterns that we all learn very quickly to survive in whatever environment that we’re in.” Urban has been sober for nearly two decades.

He wrote the song with Marc Scibilia the first day they met. Urban walked into Scibilia's Nashville studio, barely haven spoken to one another, and started writing. It began with the guitar, the overdubs, the melody, a second verse, and then a particularly devastating lyrical line flows out of Urban: “Never sure/What made him so mad at the world/Mad at me/I was just a kid/I won’t do the same.”

“I just burst out crying on this guy’s couch, just like in a fetal position, like I’m in therapy,” Urban recalls. “He looks over and he just goes, ‘Hmm, must be true.’ And then went back to work. And it was the perfect reaction because it wasn’t judgmental. It was of no opinion. And he just let me stay in it and finish out the song. And then that was it.”

Then he suggests, like all of the songs on this record, from the clear-as-day goodtime records and the others that might center on more complicated emotions, it's “a hopeful song.”

“It’s offering hope and a way through a situation that a lot of people might find themselves in,” he says, because it assures they have the power to get out.

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