Keith Urban says 'High' is about order and chaos, with songs about love, life and his late father

NEW YORK (AP) — Decades into one of the most consistent careers in contemporary country music, and you'd think Keith Urban has this whole album thing worked out. But his 11th studio album, “High," out Friday, was no walk in the park.

It's been four years since 2020's “The Speed of Now Part 1,” and in that time, Urban wrote another record, “615,” and scrapped it.

"It’s the only time I’ve ever gone into the studio with a very clear sort of intent to make a particular kind of record, that had focus. I started to wonder if my musical adventurousness on records needed a little more discipline," he laughs. “The end result was this thing that was just a bit linear. It was just a lot of the same kind of thing, and it was missing the spirit of the curiosity of the edges and places that I’m interested in exploring and going to.”

So, instead, Urban returned to what he knows best — fluidity in the studio, unbeholden to genre limitations, the magic of uninhibited songwriting — channeling one of his favorite albums, the New Radicals' 1998 alt-rock classic “Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too," with its oscillating qualities. One song has impeccable structure and recording, the next is “stream of consciousness, random, I don't even know what it is,” he says. “The album had this beautiful flowing energy of organized and chaos... The spirit of most of my albums has contained some element of that.”