Keith Urban discusses his drug and alcohol addiction, his successful career and more in a new interview with Rolling Stone Australia.
The singer, who is marking 15 years of sobriety this October, tells the mag how he doesn’t want fans thinking they can’t party at his shows.
Urban shares, “I don’t want people at my concert looking at the stage and thinking about sobriety. That would be the death of a gig for me.”
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He admits, referencing his late father Robert’s alcohol addiction, “It took me a long time to get sober. Took me a long time to recognize my alcoholism. A long time because I didn’t drink like my dad, so I compared everything to him. So it just took a long time for me. But I was able to finally make the right choice in my life, that I wish my dad would have made.”
Urban tells the publication, “The reason I don’t really talk much about sobriety is it’s a very personal thing and I don’t want anyone thinking that I have a negative opinion of drugs or alcohol. I don’t have any at all, none. I want people to come to my concert and do whatever the hell they want to do.”
The star, who married Nicole Kidman in 2006, also reveals how he once took six songs into a label executive years ago for his third album.
However, the label exec said at the time: “I just don’t hear anything that you should put on your record.”
The album, Golden Road, went triple Platinum in the U.S. and one of the six songs, “Who Wouldn’t Wanna Be Me”, shot to No. 1 on the U.S. country chart.
Plus, Urban explains how he’s only recently started calling himself a “songwriter.”
He’s been told in the past: “Well you sure write a lot of songs for someone who isn’t a songwriter.”
