Keith Urban is releasing a live version of one of his biggest hits. The 57-year-old announces the release of a live version of "Long Hot Summer," a song that was first released in 2011 from his Get Closer album.
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The recording is from Urban's current High and Alive World Tour. Per a press release, the live version of "Long Hot Summer" is the first track being shared from a forthcoming new live album, slated to be released this fall.
Urban penned "Long Hot Summer" with Richard Marx. Surprisingly, the uptempo, feel-good track came after one of the most challenging seasons in Urban's life, when he lost all of his guitars in the devastating 2010 Nashville flood. Undeterred, Urban borrowed a guitar for his writing session with Marx, and the rest is history.
"I like to have at least one of these kinds of songs on my album," Urban tells The Boot. The two began the song but didn't finish it in one session. Urban and Marx met up again when Urban was opening for the Eagles.
"We were sitting on the bus working, trying to finish the song, when Joe Walsh came onto the bus," Urban remembers.
"We had to tell him we were trying to finish a song," Marx continues. "And he was like, 'Oh, I can come back.' So he left, and we finished it and did a work tape on it. Then Keith put it on his album! It's one of my favorite songs that we've written."
Keith Urban's High and Alive World Tour
Urban waited three agonizing years between tours, until launching his High and Alive World Tour earlier this year. A veteran performer, the singer admits he still struggles with one aspect of his live shows: choosing which songs to play.
"It's a lot of trial and error with set lists for me," Urban 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."
"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," he adds.
