Keith Urban is living proof that accolades don’t necessarily equal confidence.
With four Grammys, five ARIA Awards and 24 country number one hits over a three-decade career, Urban is a massive success by anyone’s measure.
But the humble Brisbane via New Zealand expat, who is now based in Nashville, only recently began calling himself a songwriter.
During his magazine cover interviews, Urban told Rolling Stone Australia he’s heard, ‘Well you sure write a lot of songs for someone who isn’t a songwriter’ a lot in the past.
When he spoke to the mag, it had been a week since he last picked up a guitar.
That is what Urban had to find the confidence to mentally overcome.
“For the longest time I would say to myself, I’m not really a songwriter. I’m a guitar player blah blah blah,” he said. “[…] In the last year or two I’ve pivoted to saying, ‘Well I love writing songs’.”
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Pretending to give himself a stern talking to, he added, “just start there Keith.”
Indeed, Urban’s songwriting has influenced the likes of Taylor Swift, who told Rolling Stone Australia that he ‘redefined the genre’ for her.
“His melodies and inflections influenced me so intensely because they were so different from what I was hearing in country at that time, incorporating rock, pop, and blues into the mix,” she said.
“He absolutely redefined the genre for me, by making it a wider and more expansive place to create from within.”
Urban announced plans for a European tour on Instagram two weeks ago.
The Speed of Now world tour will take in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Germany through April and May next year.
He will return to Australia in December 2022.
The tour will be the first since Urban’s tour manager of a decade, Randy “Baja” Fletcher, died as a result of injuries he sustained falling from the stage before the band’s appearance at Bash on the Bay in Ohio.
