Keith Urban is opening up about his forthcoming new album, Flow State. Out on June 12, the record is all yacht rock music.
If the Grand Ole Opry member releasing a project with yacht rock music surprised his fans, it also surprised Urban.
“The album was so unexpected,” Urban tells Entertainment Tonight. “I just wanted to make music to break in my studio, some fun music. And this album was just a couple of songs that grew and grew and grew, and before I knew it, we had a whole record.”
Urban could by now have his pick of artists to join him on any of his albums. Instead, he chose just three to sing with him on some of the 11 tracks on Flow State.
“We’ve got a few collabs: Little Big Town, on a track called ‘Magnet and Steel’ … Michael McDonald, legend, on a brand-new song called ‘We Go Back.’ And then John Mayer on a track called ‘Guitar Man.'”
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What Keith Urban Says About Creating ‘Flow State’
If not for Urban purchasing a studio in Nashville, Flow State may have never existed.
“It really started from me buying a studio in town. It used to be called the Tracking Room. It’s been around a long time, and I acquired that studio in ‘24,” Urban reveals on SiriusXM‘s The Highway. Urban spent the next nine months working on getting his new studio ready.
“By the time it was ready to record in, I was hitting the road,” he continues. “It was one of those frustrating things where I wasn’t going to get to record there very much. And so, I was trying to find something that would just be simple and fun to do, to just record. I called Dann Huff, and I go, ‘How about we just do one or two yacht rock songs, just to break the studio in for a bit of fun?’ And that was it.”
A big fan of yacht rock music, the 58-year-old insists he never had any big dreams of making a record like Flow State, at least until he started working on the songs.
“There was no big preconceived idea,” Urban says. “We recorded two songs, and the session band came in, and we all looked at each other, and we went, ‘These sound really good.’ And Dann Huff looks at me, he goes, ‘You got any more?’ And I’m like, ‘There’s a lot of them. I mean, let’s do a couple more.’ So I went on tour, and a few weeks later, we reassembled the band. We did a couple more, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe we’ve got an EP. That’d be fun. Just something fun.’ And then it just kept growing and growing over the course of four, five, six months, and we ended up with a whole album.”
All Of the Songs on Keith Urban’s ‘Flow State’
1. Steal Away
2. Baby Come Back
3. Magnet and Steel (ft. Little Big Town)
4. Just the Two of Us
5. On and On
6. We Go Back (ft. Michael McDonald)
7. Help Is On It’s Way
8. How Much I Feel
9. Summer Breeze
10. I Just Wanna Stop
11. Guitar Man (ft. John Mayer)
Photo Credit: CMA / Luke Dyson