Brief LB mentions in Keith Urban interview

[Les]

Denver Rocky Mountain News, 12/6/2004

URBAN TAPS THE UNIQUE IN HIS TALENT NEW ALBUM SHOWS 'CURSE' NOW A BLESSING
by Mark Brown

Usually in the music world - for that matter, in life - good looks tend to work in your favor. Country rocker Keith Urban doesn't particularly mind that his blond hair and clean looks get him some attention, but it's misleading as well.

"Because there's a lot of girls that come to the concerts, the guys tend to think it's gonna be a David Cassidy performance or something. They tend to go away surprised, because it is about musicianship at the core of everything," Urban says.

That's for sure. The guys who get dragged there against their will find they're at a show by a great guitarist, influenced more by Mark Knopfler and Lindsey Buckingham than the traditional Nashville pickers.

Born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, Urban was learning lead-guitar solos off records from the time he was 6 years old. He's at the Fillmore Auditorium tonight touring his latest album, Be Here, after winning male vocalist of the year at the Country Music Awards last month.

"I really started guitar solos from the songs I was learning. I didn't seek out guitar players. I just learned the solos," Urban says via cell phone from Chicago. "It wasn't till I was 14 or 15 that I discovered Dire Straits. Mark Knopfler is a great guitarist who I related to. I loved his melodies."

His songs, he says, aren't so much his guitar accompanying his voice as "a duet between me and the guitar. The song is first. The lyric and what the song is about will dictate everything. Again, Mark Knopfler is so great at that. Lindsey Buckingham is great at that. It's not about doing a whole bunch of scales over the song. It's about being moved by the song's lyrics to play a certain way."

That comes through on the new album both on the songs he wrote and the ones he didn't. Nobody Drinks Alone has a great guitar solo in it, but it opens and closes with textured guitar work different from what you hear out of Nashville these days. The whole album focuses on the notion of living in the moment, opening with Days Go By and closing with These Are the Days.

"I didn't consciously seek out a theme for a record, but it captured where I was at in my life at the time. I'd finished reading a book The Power of Now and it resonated with me - the importance of being in the moment. It's getting harder to do with so much technological noise going on around us. We have to plan so far ahead sometime for the future. We get so consumed. At some point we're gonna start living our life the way we want, but it seems so far away."

He moved to Nashville about seven years ago at 23, figuring to capitalize on the Australian success he'd built up. He was quickly rebuffed.

"We'd had tangible success. We'd had number one country hits. I know what I'm doing here. And of course when you get to Nashville, because you're doing it so differently, you may as well not know how to do any of it. To them, not only do you not know, you know a whole lot about how not to do it," he says. "If you're different in Nashville and you're from Oklahoma, they might think it's original. But if it's different and you're from Australia, you've got to be ignorant. I started to question if I was any good. I'm doing the best I can - maybe I do suck."

One night at a show, though, a record-company executive came up to him with a piece of advice.

"He came up to me and said, 'You know you're really unique, and that's gonna be your biggest curse until it becomes your greatest blessing.' It just resonated so deep with me. I'm just gonna hang in here. That one piece of advice really carried me through times when I questioned myself."

Session work followed with the likes of the Dixie Chicks and Garth Brooks before 2002's Golden Road brought him his own solo success.

INFOBOX
Keith Urban
* When and where: 8 p.m. today, Fillmore Auditorium, 1510 Clarkson St.
* Cost: $29.50
* Information: 303-830-8497 or www.ticket master.com.