hog heaven interview

HUSTON
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Music
Country's Keith Urban finds touring to be Hog heaven
By Michael Corcoran
Oct. 14, 2004
He's the hottest thing in country music, with two albums in the Top 10, including the new "Be Here" at No. 1. The Celtic-flavored ditty "Days Go By" has been the top country single for four weeks and the video is on the CMT channel even more often than Cledus T. Judd.

Keith Urban is everywhere. But when this country heartthrob says he's not really paying attention to his ascent to superstardom, you believe him. On the other end of the phone, he sounds that laid-back and muse-driven. "I just love to play music," says the 36-year-old Aussie, who's just starting to lose his accent after 15 years in Nashville. "I let the label people and my managers worry about the other stuff." Control freak Garth Brooks' career is rolling over in its grave.

To Urban, "hands on" refers to his overhead grip on the monster chopper he lugs around with him, along with two Harleys, in a custom trailer while he's on the road. The opposite of tour bus living, with its large screen TV sets behind drawn curtains, is tooling around the backwoods and the interstate highways on a motorcycle, which Urban does every chance he gets. He says he can't wait to get out in the Hill Country when he comes to town Friday for a sold-out show at Stubb's.

Country music star Keith Urban says he's looking forward to motorcycling through the Hill Country. Urban plays a sold-out show Friday at Stubb's.

"When you ride around on a bike, you can get a real feel for the people and the place," he says. "You get a sense of what life is like in that town and I think that, at showtime, there's a greater connection with the crowd."

Urban has played Stubb's before, but it was at the smaller indoors venue with his old band, the Ranch, in 1997. The blonde guitar wiz with the pleasing pop voice -- he's the Glen Campbell of the oughtgeist -- went solo after the Ranch disbanded two years later. The year 1999 was a one for Urban, whose voice was so shot after years of unhealthy living, that he couldn't sing for a couple of months. "When you're young, your body is so resilient," he says. "I didn't have to exercise or eat right or drink eight glasses of water a day when I was 22."

These days, Urban travels with a personal trainer and consults with a nutritionist. And his partying ways are long in the past. Although the singer has previously gone public about his sobriety, even remarking that his sponsor probably wouldn't approve of the lyrics to "Tonight I Wanna Cry," with its nod to the numbing effects of wine, he shies away from questions about how long he's been alcohol-free. "I'm not trying to be a poster child for good, clean living," he says. "I just try to live my life as honestly as I can."

The songs on "Be Here," which follows the 2002 breakout LP "The Golden Road," suggest that Urban's the hugging type. The perfume of positivity is undeniable on such original compositions as "You're My Better Half" (the next single), "God's Been Good To Me" and "Live To Love Another Day," each linked by the theme of living life in the moment.

But the songs Urban chose to cover say just as much about the artist. Rodney Crowell's "Making Memories Of Us" is an unashamedly smitten love song that suggests Urban has a special someone (a subject, like his sobriety, that he dodges with the grace of a Spanish bullfighter). Elton John's "Country Comfort," meanwhile, is more of a musical indicator. Although Urban comes from the country field, his seamless, catchy music is really closer to the melodic pop and heartland rock of artists such as Elton, John Mellencamp, Don Henley and his co-writer (on "Better Life") Richard Marx.

It was Mark Knopler who was Urban's greatest inspiration as a guitarist. "When the first Dire Straits album came out, I would sit in my room for hours every day trying to play those solos note by note," Urban says. As a child, raised on a farm in rural Australia, he loved his parents' Johnny Cash and Hank Williams records and vowed, at age 7, that he would one day live in Nashville and write songs. But as a teenage guitar nut, he started expanding his repertoire and played in various country rock outfits.

His childhood dream finally won out in the late '80s, when an Australian publishing company sent him to Nashville to write hits for other artists. "I did the Music Row thing five days a week," he recalls. "I'd show up at some barren office at 10 in the morning to write songs with a total stranger, which is not the way I was used to writing songs." Urban says he cried many mornings and wanted to go home, but he stuck it out because he didn't want to let his publisher down. "Nashville has been like a good, strict coach. It's drilled me and pushed me and there have been times when I've hated its guts," he says. "But I'm a better musician for it. Now I look back and think, 'Well, I wouldn't have the career I have now if it had been easy.'