Keith Urban is so happy to be back on the road. The singer-songwriter just launched his High and Alive World Tour, marking his first tour in three years, since his 2022 The Speed of Now World Tour. Urban originally planned to tour in 2024, but when he decided to scrap the album he had made, that also meant prolonging his tour for another year.
Urban loves to perform. But perhaps even more, he loves what his performance can do for his fans.
“Just to take everybody out of their lives for a couple of hours, plus,” Urban tells Entertainment Tonight of his reason for touring. “Just where everything’s good. You can forget about everything in your life, all the stresses and worries, just crap. You can just forget all about it and lose yourself in this other realm for a few hours.”
Urban is grateful most of all that he can tour at all. The 57-year-old spent his whole life dreaming of being able to perform in front of large crowds, a dream that has come true time and time again. Still, he doesn’t forget what it was like when he was just getting started, and no one knew who he was.
“I’ve got more songs people know. That’s the greatest thing of all,” Urban reflects. “I came up playing in the clubs. I quit school at 15. I was playing four hours a night, five nights a week at 15. My mom and dad would drive me around. And I’m doing cover songs, and I remember even at that age thinking, ‘Oh man, I wish I could write one song that the audience knew and sang along with like they do with all these songs.’ And so to have that now is surreal.”
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Few, if any, artists operate from the amount of gratitude that Urban does. But even he admits his success comes at a cost, a cost he is willing to pay for the sheer joy of performing live.
“I think it’s either a calling or it’s not,” the Grand Ole Opry member says. “And you know it internally. There’s nobody that can ultimately tell you that, show you that, lead you to that. It’s just an internal voice that you have that’s like, ‘This is what I’m meant to do.’ And so when you wake up on a tour bus at 3:30 in the morning and in you’re in the middle of nowhere. It’s freezing cold, and you’re sick as a dog, and you’ve got to do a meet and greet and perform that night, and you’re lonely and you’re missing your family. When you’re sitting in that bunk, crying, going ‘Why am I doing this?,’ the only answer can be, ‘Well, this is what I do.’ And you just do it.”
“You’ve gotta love it,” he adds. “At the end of the day, it’s just gotta be your purpose. It really does … It’s a calling. It really is.”
Urban opened up about his thankfulness at the recent ACM Awards, where he received the prestigious Triple Crown Award.
“I’m a bit speechless, actually,” Urban said backstage after receiving the trophy. “I love that I get to do this. I love playing music. I don’t feel like any time has passed at all between winning Best New Artist and then winning Entertainer in 2019. It feels like really no time has passed at all.”
Find all of Urban’s music and upcoming shows at KeithUrban.com.