Keith Urban just kicked off his long-awaited High and Alive World Tour. The tour is Urban's first in three years, since his The Speed of Now World Tour in 2022. With a new HIGH album out, plus 30 years of hit songs in country music, Urban admits deciding which songs to play each night is challenging.
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"It's a lot of trial and error with set lists for me," Urban, who also has new band members, admits. "I agonize over setlists. It's like a Rubik's Cube. I spend months and months over setlists, tweaking, coming back to it every couple of days, looking at it. I put a playlist together and Iisten to the songs back-to-back-to-back ,and just feel the flow from one song into the next - energy-wise, thematically, the key, tempo, everything."
Urban reveals he tries to imagine his audience as he pores through his wide selection of songs to choose from.
"Does this feel like it should flow out of that?" he reflects. "Is the audience gonna be exhausted right about here? This would be a good time for a ballad. This would be a good time to strip it down to an acoustic song and then BOOM right back out of the gate again. Trying to imagine what the live experience is gonna be and put a setlist together for it ... We'll just keep making changes as the tour unfolds."
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Urban originally planned on touring in 2024, but had to adjust those plans when he scrapped an entire album. He could by now have anyone he wanted to join him on the road, but he picked three relative newcomers to serve as his opening acts: Chase Matthew, Alana Springsteen and Karley Scott Collins.
"Chase I had heard about a couple of years ago, and just loved his voice, and his vibe, and his songs are great," Urban tells Audacy. "He's great live, and I thought my audience would really like him a lot. Alana Springsteen sat in with us when we played Summerfest in Milwaukee, and we did a song together. I just loved her vibe, and her voice is so good. So I asked her if she wanted to tag along.
"And then Karley Scott Collins was an artist that a friend of mine, Nathan Chapman, was producing," he continues. "He called me up and said, 'I've got this track I'd love for you to play a solo on.' Went into the studio, heard it. Loved her voice, loved the song."
