Country superstar Keith Urban joined Audacy host Scotty Kay at Chicago’s US*99, taking over the show on the night of his surprise concert at Carol’s Pub following his appearance in the Windy City over the weekend at the NASCAR Street Race.

The intimate show, dubbed How I Got Here, Keith explains, stems from his forthcoming album which “was always gonna be called ‘HIGH,’" he says, “and when we talk about doing these underplay shows leading up to the release of the album that were going on sale before the album title was announced… my smart manager Elizabeth suggested it might be a great anacronym for how I got here, which is how I got here is playing tiny little clubs.”

“This is how I got to do what I'm doing,” Keith adds, “so it's like second nature to me to be in a tiny little club. I mean, the benefit is that people hopefully are coming to listen. I'm used to playing in these clubs when nobody cares that you're up on stage.”

Touching on lessons learned throughout his more than 30-year career, from Keith’s perspective “everything is nuanced -- entertaining, playing guitar, writing songs, making records… Every part of it is just learning nuance.” More recently, scaling things back and taking a more minimal approach has been his challenge. “Because my music tends to sort of expand and contract and these club shows have been a great opportunity to bring it back to just a bare minimum,” Urban tells us. “There's no track support, there's no video screens, there's no keyboards, there's nothing. It’s just what you see.”

“I come from playing in a lot of three-piece bands where there was just me, drums, and bass. So you have to play guitar very, very differently than when you're in a band with a guitar player, a keyboard player,” Keith says. “I was looking forward to bringing it back, to getting into that place where there's nowhere to hide. That's really the thing. There is nowhere to hide when people are standing right in front of you. There's no trickery and there's no net.”

Keith is well known by fans for his incredible stage presence, often taking the show into the stands to get up close and personal with attendees. His crew, he says, are all used to his antics by now. “The truth is… I've done it for so long that I could run off and go in almost any direction and make it work with no security -- knock on wood -- I've been doing it so long, I can slip and slide in and out of almost anything from headlocks to freakish hugs,” Urban says.

“I was at a gig one time,” he recalls, “I ran out in the crowd; I was coming back and this woman I thought was just being a little bit too much of a fan, she latched onto my guitar and just wouldn't let it go. I'm sort of trying to get back to the stage and I'm pulling my guitar and she's coming with me and I'm like, ‘She's a complete psycho!’ It then occurred to me I'd hooked my guitar into the mesh of her clothing. She was trying to become untangled and I'm actually dragging her all the way back to the stage like a fish caught in a net and she's desperately trying to escape. The most unusual things can happen!”

Clothing mishaps aside, consistency is “all I know,” Keith says. “When we started touring there was two people and you give those two people a show like this, you know, 200,000 people, it doesn't matter. You just give it everything… I mean, they came, they went through whatever hoops they jumped through to make it to the show, give them 100%.”

As a native Aussie, Keith felt quite at home attending the NASCAR Street Race. “We certainly don't have the running moonshine history, you know, the real origins of it all,” he explained, “but the big one was called Bathurst, which is in a town called Bathurst in New South Wales. It's a rural area and they race around this entire rural area -- very much like NASCAR. They do a real circuit, and I think it might be 500 miles or something like that.”

“Driving,” Keith tells us, is “literally a passion for me. Even if we play Vegas, I'll send a car out there -- but my own car so that I can drive it to and from the gig, to the hotel or wherever I'm staying… Even if I'm in another country, I'll rent a car just so I can drive to the gig and home because the thing about coming off stage after playing for two hours, it's just rowdy noise just full-on sensory overload. Walking up, getting in my own car on my own, and quietly driving home is an amazing feeling. It's dead quiet. It's just me. I love it.”

“I don't really do much else,” he adds. “I don't golf. I don't hunt, I don't fish. I just play music. I write songs and drive cars. It's a full life.”

When putting together his forthcoming album HIGH, Keith says what helped him find his way was realizing what it was not, “because it can only go up from there. It's like, ‘OK, I know what it isn't. That'll help me figure out what it is.’” Kind of like a Wordle approach to songwriting, he admits, “turning the situation around, to go, ‘this is cluing you and helping you.’“

Keith’s  single “Straight Line,” he says he knew he wanted early on the record “because it just felt like the spirit. It’s an easy, digestible, instant catchy song. Then once you feel good about that, hopefully, then we can move through to the next bunch.”

His track “Go Home W U” featuring Lainey Wilson he tells us was already written and ready to go when he announced her as the 2024 CMAs Entertainer of the Year. “I'm like, ‘I can't believe I can't put this song out just yet,’” he remembers. “It was so frustrating.”

Keith recalls first hearing Lainey a few years ago, “I think somebody had played me a song that she had recorded, I think maybe before she even started working with Jay Joyce and it was just her voice… It's just a certain quality that you can't put your finger on. I heard her voice in a way that I thought, ‘I think our voices would go good together if we could find the right song,’ and originally that song wasn't a duet. That song had sat around for four years. We wrote it in 2020. We weren't intending to do it as a duet. A friend of mine, Dan McCarroll said, actually, ‘I think a girl could sing the second verse,’ and I looked at it and went, ‘Actually, I think it'll work. I happen to know the 'Entertainer of the Year' so I can put her on the phone.’"

Running through the rest of the album and landing on “Better Life For You,” "we wrote that song here in Chicago,” Keith reveals. “I think it's the first song I wrote with Richard Marx. Somebody suggested to write with him and he said, ‘I've got a house in Chicago. Why don't you come to the house and we'll just hang out for a couple of days and see what happens?’ We built this whole track, the two of us, and we have no words.”

The only logical choice was to put some gibberish together and record it to tape as well. “We went out into his car and just drove around all his area of Chicago playing this tape over and over again,” Urban remembers, going. "'I think this is a hell of a great song. But what is it about?’ We had no words, nothing… We would just come back and listen to it phonetically. ‘It sounds like you're saying ‘someday baby something or other,’ so we just sort of wrote it out phonetically."

Listen to Scotty Kay’s full interview with Keith Urban above, and stay tuned for more conversations with your favorite artists right here on Audacy.

Keith Urban's 2024 album HIGH will be out everywhere on September 20.