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Keith Urban reflected on the way his vocal surgery led to a shift in his confidence and experimentation in his music.
The powerhouse singer-songwriter and musician joined World Cafe host Raina Douris on a recent Backtracking segment, in which artists answer prompts about their music and share the stories behind their songs. Douris asked Urban which of his songs marked the beginning of a sonic journey for him, and the country star revealed: “Somewhere in My Car.”
“The reason why I chose this is because it was on an album called Fuse, which came out in 2013,” Urban said, in part, as he spoke about “Somewhere in My Car.” “It’s the first — I had vocal surgery probably a year, year and a half before this record. I’d made a whole bunch of albums with [producer] Dann Huff and my vocal cords were getting damaged, and from a previous way of living life that was not good for my vocal cords (that) eventually caught up with me. And I needed really serious vocal cord surgery. (I) had that, and when I came out of the surgery…(there was) this crazy big range that have opened up in my cords, and I could experiment with writing songs and working with people in a way that I hadn’t been able to before because my confidence was going down. As my cords inconsistent in their performance, so was my confidence. And so, I just sort of, you know, I could feel my records getting a bit smaller, and a bit smaller, and the vocal surgery opened up this feeling of experimentation. …It was scary and exciting all at the same time.”
Urban reportedly underwent the surgery in November 2011 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. He was placed on vocal rest to recover before he returned to the stage. Throughout the World Cafe conversation, Urban also shared which song he wrote in just one sitting, the song that changed everything and the song that surprised him. Find the full podcast on iHeartRadio here.