A new album is coming from Keith Urban, and it’s a live one! Urban announces the release of the live version of “Long Hot Summer,” recorded during his current High and Alive World Tour. Per a press release, the song is part of an “as-of-yet-unnamed live album slated to come this fall.”
“Long Hot Summer,” first released in 2011 from his Get Closer record, was written by Urban and Richard Marx. The live version will be out on July 25.
Urban launched his High and Alive World Tour in May, his first tour in three years. As an artist who loves performing live, the 57-year-old says he puts a lot of thought into every detail of his shows, making sure his fans have the best night possible.
“First of all, without the audience, it’s just one long sound check,” Urban explains. “So the audience is everything, everything. I was thinking the other day, there’s a line in a Jackson Browne song called ‘The Load Out,’ where he talks about the audience. He goes, ‘People, you’ve got the power over what we do. You can sit there and wait or you can pull us through.’ The audience has so much power to make or break a show. We as a performer can only do so much.
“I’ve watched our audience night after night after night just give so much to me on stage,” he adds. “And when that happens, you can just play forever. If we didn’t have curfews, we’d play way longer.”
Urban, himself a father of two, also understands the sacrifices people make to be able to go to a concert.
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“The other thing that I really am aware of, especially having kids, when you want to go to a concert, it’s a big deal,” he remarks.. “It’s not like going to the movies. It’s a very different thing. You know, parking and babysitters and the like – are we going to carpool? And tickets at will call. We have to get there two hours [early] to line up. And it’s a big, big deal. And then parking, all the expenses, it goes through the roof. So my want is to give them the greatest night and give everything I’ve got, to not take that for granted.”
From the opening night until his final show, Urban is always working on making each aspect of his show, including the songs he does and doesn’t sing, the best it can be.
“It’s a lot of trial and error with setlists for me,” Urban acknowledges. “I agonize over setlists. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube. I spend months and months over setlists, tweaking, coming back to it every couple of days, looking at it. I put a playlist together and Iisten to the songs back-to-back-to-back and just feel the flow from one song into the next – energy-wise, thematically, the key, tempo, everything.
“Does this feel like it should flow out of that? Is the audience gonna be exhausted right about here? This would be a good time for a ballad,” he continues. “This would be a good time to strip it down to an acoustic song and then BOOM right back out of the gate again. Trying to imagine what the live experience is gonna be, and put a setlist together for it … We’ll just keep making changes as the tour unfolds.”
Urban’s “Straight Line” single is currently in the Top 20. Pre-order the live version of “Long Hot Summer,” and find all of Urban’s music and upcoming shows, at KeithUrban.com.