Keith Urban Recalls One of His Biggest Concert Failures

Keith Urban may be one of the biggest names in country music, but he still experiences a bad concert every now and again. In an interview with Taste of Country, Urban told a story of one of his biggest concert failures and revealed how Prince made him realize certain ideas don’t make sense on stage.

Keith Urban had an idea for a concert

Throughout his career, Urban has been known to put on a great show. Speaking with Taste of Country, Urban talked about how much he loves touring and interacting with fans.

In the interview, Urban shared an idea he had for a concert many years ago.

“We did a tour one year where I was fascinated with what would happen if — this is in the late 2000s — if you just killed all the lights in the arena and we’d do an entire song in the dark. I had never seen it and thought it would be kind of bizarre. Kind of surreal. I didn’t rehearse this, I just kind of came up with the idea in my head of how we were gonna do it,” Urban told Taste of Country.

He continued, “I was gonna do a song at the piano, ‘Tonight I Wanna Cry.’ And I thought I’d have all these candles lit on the piano and I’ll walk out and make up some sort of speech and as I’m saying it I would dramatically blow out a candle at a time.”

The country singer’s idea did not work

When Urban put this idea into practice, he found that it did not work the way he intended when he could not see the piano to play.

“I sit down and it goes, ‘CLUNK, CLUNK, CLUNK, CLUNK …’ because I can’t see s***. I did not think about it. I could not see anything on the keyboard,” Urban told Taste of Country.

The country singer revealed that his “lighting guy” saved him, but that the idea was never able to come to fruition during the concert.

“My lighting guy quickly puts up a key light on me to regain my composure… And he left this light on the whole time… I come off stage and I said to the lighting guy, ‘OK, so I blew it at the beginning, but why did you leave the light on?’ He goes, ‘Because it doesn’t work. It just looked like crap in the dark.’ I’m like, ‘Ah! You guys never want to try anything new,'” said Urban.

Prince made Keith Urban have a realization

Years later, Urban went to a Prince concert and watched the artist try the same thing. While in the audience, Urban realized that performing a concert in the dark “doesn’t work.”

“And he goes, ‘Alright, lights out!’ And they kill the lights in the arena and the band kept jamming. And within 30 seconds I look around people are doing their emails on their phone. They’re just texting … because there’s nothing to look at. I sat there and said, ‘Yeah, that doesn’t work,'” Urban shared with Taste of Country.