Keith Urban Looks to Fans for ‘Magical Things’ on U.S. Tour
For Keith Urban, who kicked off his new U.S. tour this week, hitting the road is a family affair.
Keith Urban: The Rolling Stone Country Interview
When at all possible, he brings wife Nicole Kidman and their two daughters, Sunday and Faith, with him. “Or I tour in such a short sporadic way that I am only gone three days and then fly home again,” Urban tells Rolling Stone Country. When the country star plays West Coast dates, the whole family relocates from Nashville to their Los Angeles home and he’ll fly home after the show, if possible. “So I’m zipping in and out from [L.A.]. The girls, everybody comes.”
His shows have always been electrifying, but if you’ve noticed that Urban, 46, just keeps getting better and better, that means his hard work is paying off. “I am eternally hungry for improvement in every single thing I do,” he says. “I’m trying to be a better singer. I’m trying to be a better guitar player. I’m trying to put on better shows, put a better set list together, know how to talk to a crowd better, take a crowd on a journey, all of it… It’s a lifetime journey of learning.”
After he steps off stage every night, the New Zealand-born musician reviews the show in his mind and by the next time he performs, he says, “I’ve got a big laundry list of things I’m anxious to see if I can get right tonight, or expand upon.”
As much as he prepares for the shows, Urban is always aware that the best moments are the unexpected ones — when he, his band, and the crowd find themselves in perfect harmony and the show becomes something much greater than the sum of its parts: “Those moments that come from somewhere else, just because you feel good, the audience is good, everything is right and magical things happen,” he says. “Those moments are so beautiful because they are absolute fact proof that this stuff is coming from somewhere else.”
Urban’s Raise ‘Em Up Tour ends Sept. 13th at the Washington State Fair in Puyallup. See a full list of cities and dates here.