Balance Requires Correction: Keith Urban Speaks

A year after putting his career on hold to confront personal demons, the superstar gauges his hits, his goals and the state of modern country

By Alan Light
Special to MSN Music

Dec. 1, 2007

In October 2006, Keith Urban said to me that "each year you have a different understanding of gratitude, of humility, of love -- and I feel all of that differently the older I get." The next day, he checked himself into the Betty Ford Center for substance-abuse treatment. This was just four months after Urban's headline-grabbing wedding to Nicole Kidman, and a mere two weeks before the release of his fourth U.S. album, which bore the telling title "Love, Pain, & the Whole Crazy Thing."

Since the 1999 release of his self-titled U.S. debut album, the New Zealand-born, Australian-raised Urban's career had exploded, making him one of the biggest stars in country music. His three albums had sold a combined 8 million-plus copies, and he had reeled off seven No. 1 country singles in five years.

Urban was a rare Nashville triple threat -- a strong songwriter, electrifying performer and hotshot guitar player (he worked as a session player when he first moved to Music City) -- who was now also a paparazzi-stalked celebrity. But his stint in rehab derailed the plans for the "Love, Pain ..." album; though it has sold almost 2 million copies, it didn't catapult him to the global A-List status many predicted.

Now Keith Urban, who recently turned 40, is back in business with the "Greatest Hits: 18 Kids" collection. The disc gathers all of his irresistibly well-crafted singles -- go ahead, just try to get 2004's "Days Go By" out of your head -- along with two new cuts (a bonus DVD includes a dozen videos as well). On the telephone before a show in Buffalo, N.Y., he looked back at the highs, the lows and the changes chronicled in this compilation.

It's a few days after the County Music Association awards, where Urban took home no trophies but was nominated in all the major categories, including Entertainer of the Year, an honor he won in 2005. The ceremony was just a quick break from his road work: The current tour continues through the end of the year, and a co-headlining jaunt with Carrie Underwood will follow, starting in late January. (He insists, though, that he is never away from his Oscar-winning wife for more than two weeks.)

"Whenever I have to fill out one of those immigration cards, which I've had to do a lot this year, there's that line where you have to list your occupation," Urban says. "I love entertaining, I've done it on stage since I was 6 years old, but I also love making records and writing songs. So now I always write 'music artist' -- I think that's just kind of it."

MSN Music: Is a greatest hits record a time for reflection? As you assembled this collection, did it actually cause you to go back and think about your career?

Keith Urban: That's exactly what it's done. It's been eight years since the first solo album, and it's so surprising to see time going by so quickly -- and to see that we actually had accumulated enough material for a greatest hits album. I make a reference in the liner notes to this being like a photo album -- I remember where I was living when we did each of these songs, where I was in my life. You might cringe at photos from eight years ago, but I know that these are accurate, that this really was where I was in 1999.

We're still doing all these songs live, but they've all grown and evolved. They all still fit with what we do today. But I hadn't heard the original versions in years, so it also let me see how far they've come.

Is there any song on here that has really changed for you, in its meaning or its sound, since you recorded it?

"Where the Blacktop Ends" is from the first album, and it's certainly the oldest song in our set list. We're just so much more guitar-oriented as a band now, and it sounds so much more muscular now than it did then.

Is assembling a collection like this anything like putting together a set list for a show?

It's a bit different. You want to try to find some type of consistency with the sound of the different records, as opposed to playing everything live with the same band. So you try to figure out how to do it, chronologically or whatever. But sequencing a record is a funny thing now, anyway. People aren't buying whole albums, or they're listening on shuffle. So I think in the end, people will just put them in the order they want anyway.

Is there any one song on here that stands out as a turning point, a moment when your music really went from one place to somewhere very different?

"Somebody Like You" was a big cornerstone song for me.

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