Keith Urban still bringing in new fans

Keith Urban has seen a phenomenon during his shows this summer that doesn’t always happen for artists like him, who have enjoyed careers spanning two decades or more.

Roughly a third of his audiences these days are made up of fans who have never seen him in concert, and judging by their reaction to certain back catalog songs, aren’t familiar with his early albums or even some of the 20 chart-topping hits that propelled Urban to the front ranks of the country music scene and has kept him there ever since.

Credit: Amy Harris/Invision/AP

Credit: Amy Harris/Invision/AP

“It’s been interesting on this tour knowing what mix of newer songs and slightly older songs, the sort of mix of things to put into the set list,” Urban said in an early August phone interview. “What we’ve discovered is the audience is so incredibly diverse. I’m seeing huge amounts of people that are seeing us for the first time, which is really extraordinary and it’s not something I expected, to be having sometimes a third of the audience being brand new, having never seen us before.”

The new fans, Urban said, have connected with tunes like “Wild Hearts” (a top-five single he released earlier this year) and “One Too Many” (a top-10 single from his 2020 album “The Speed Of Now Part 1″ that features guest vocals from pop star Pink) — songs that have brought a decidedly modern sheen to his sound.

“I can tell these are the songs that are bringing in these new audiences,” Urban said. “I can see it because we will do some of our older songs, and they don’t know them.”

Credit: Handout

This evolution in his fan base has followed a key transition period in Urban’s career. He considers his 2013 album, “Fuse,” to have started a second chapter in his career that has seen him introduce a new range of musical influences, instrumentation and synthetic sonic elements into his songs. As a result, he has broadened his sound considerably, without abandoning the pop-infused country sound that became his signature over the eight albums that culminated with “Get Closer.”

“A lot of things were happening at that time,” Urban said, looking back at the period that preceded the “Fuse” album. “I think one of the big things for me was I had vocal surgery. I had really damaged vocal cords that were giving me constant issues. It was a bit of a challenge through the making of ‘Get Closer,’ a bit of a challenge for the tour that followed.

Credit: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

“That’s a big part, I think, of what allowed me to do this reset on a new chapter,” he said. “I could sing things I couldn’t sing before that…After vocal surgery, it was like having, I don’t know, just a brand new, resilient voice that was there all of the time. It did incredible things to my self esteem, my confidence, just general mood. My general mood just elevated and lifted and I became much more willing to follow my musical curiosities, and not stay in a limited place of safety. So it wasn’t coincidental, it was right about then that I started going out and working with other producers, songwriters, other recording engineers, other everything because I was in a confident musical exploration mode. That, then, yielded ‘Fuse,’ and ‘Ripcord’ (his 2016 album) and all of the records that came after.”

Urban’s willingness to embrace musical styles and sounds that come from outside of country isn’t new. Even on his 1999 self-titled debut album, he incorporated elements that were uncommon in country music at the time, such as programmed rhythms on the song “It’s A Love Thing” and the Cajun rhythms and instrumentation on “I Wanna Be Your Man (Forever).”

But there was a distinct shift from a fairly organic, guitar-based sound to a more modern, more wide-ranging sonic aesthetic on “Fuse.” And “The Speed of Now Part 1″ continued to stretch Urban’s sound and style.

The most obvious example is “Out The Cage,” a song with an R&B/hip-hop feel that features contributions from Nile Rogers of Chic and somehow also mixes in some banjo from Urban. “Say Something,” meanwhile, incorporates vocal cadences, light synthetic rhythms and the breezy feel of much of today’s top 40 pop.

At the same time, “The Speed of Now Part 1″ also includes several ballads (including “Live With,” “Change Your Mind” and “Forever”) that fit the country-pop sound that’s been at the heart of all of Urban’s 11 albums — even if these latest songs come with decidedly modern production.

Urban began his tour in support of “The Speed Of Now Part 1″ in mid-June, so he’s had time to fine tune his set, which routinely runs more than two hours, to please both new and long-time fans.

“I guess the things that I look at when I’m putting a set list together are tempo, keys, familiarity, subject matter, those sorts of things,” Urban said. “So it’s really more of a playlist we put together to create a certain mood in the room and a certain atmosphere and environment, just a certain experience. So that ends up being hopefully a good mix of everything, songs off of all different kinds of records.”