Keith Urban stopped by The Bobby Bones Show to talk about his new song “Messed Up As Me,” share the time he got booed and fired from a gig and more!
Keith Urban released his new song “Messed Up As Me” today (March 1) and it’s about a relationship that has one good thing going for it, the rest is dysfunctional, toxic and makes no sense, but that one part of the relationship is phenomenal, which he said was super relatable for him. Urban can be unpredictable when he releases new music. Sometimes he’ll release eight singles before he puts out the record. For the new music he’s working on now, he released “Straight Line” earlier this year which is the first single from his forthcoming album. He also teased that he has a duet on the album that he recorded last summer that he can’t wait to release.
Urban was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and called it one of the most surreal moments of his life. They started playing songs he wrote at the ceremony and he realized he’d written so many he’d forgotten some of them. Urban has his own record company called Hit Red and he named it that because he thinks a great engineer hits record the second anyone walks into the studio. They don’t wait for them to sit down and start something, they hit record the second they walk in because a lot of times artists come in humming a tune or riffing ideas and then they forget about it.
Urban has been playing guitar for over 30 years and has mastered it, but he’s working on not playing as much. He’s trying to stop in the middle of a guitar riff instead of going off on it, which is hard for him because he wants to complete what he’s started. His new thing is to not complete it, end in the middle of it and leave room for space. He’s mainly doing it to get out of a predictable place that he always ends up in due to muscle memory. The awareness happened when he listened back and thought he should’ve stopped at certain points but just continued and made it something it wasn’t.
Urban recalled a time early in his career when he was playing at a club and a guy came up to him and put his fingers in his ears. Then at the end of the night, the guy walked up to him and told him he sounded terrible. Urban tried to get rid of him while he was playing without causing a scene and when he finished, he was furious packing up his gear. Urban then called him some incredibly offensive things and the guy told him that his attitude would never allow him to have a career. Then he came back with the manager and got him fired.