When Keith Urban played two smaller club gigs last week, he didn’t exactly explain why he had recently let go of two of his longstanding band mates, multi-instrumentalist Nathan Barlowe and bassist Jerry Flowers.
Urban discusses his first performance without them, in which he brought in some fill-ins, in a recent interview with Q featuring Tom Power. Things didn’t go too well.
Urban acknowledges, “I dismantled the band I had and I’m rebuilding a new one, but I haven’t built it yet and I had a club show that came before I had a chance to build my band,” in reference to his performance at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern on January 13.
“So, my keyboard player played bass and we had a fill-in drummer, like The Doors, you know? The singer of “Messed Up as Me” explains, “We didn’t have a bass player.”
Urban claims that on a few occasions, he had to remind his keyboard player that he was expected to perform two tasks.
“We were playing a song when I asked, ‘Where’s the low end?’ I had to remind him to keep going for it [the bass].” Then it occurs to me that the keyboardist has overlooked the fact that he must also play bass.
In his decades as an artist, Urban has discovered that sometimes you simply have to get through it. In his own words, “You can either play and entertain, or you’re just gonna die.”
With a full world tour planned, the country music icon will need his new band to pick up the material quickly. Urban has a full itinerary of February appearances before the May commencement of the 2025 High and Alive Tour.
Luckily for him, he claims that these non-tour performances let him practice and “make sure the bones of the songs are good.”
