Keith Urban is dismantling the way he makes records — and he likes it.

Urban is working with new producers, writing with different songwriters and recording in different studios, hoping to make an album unlike anything he’s recorded to date.

So far, it’s working.

“I wanted to have everything around me be totally unfamiliar to me, and I think it’s great in a sense that all sorts of stuff is coming out that I normally haven’t done before,” he tells The Tennessean. In particular, Urban is excited about a song he wrote recently with producer Jay Joyce and Jeremy Spillman, both of whom are new co-writers for the singer.

He called the writing session “exhilarating” and says it “gave birth to a song that I never would have written with anybody else melodically and in a lot of other ways, too.”

Urban says he has accrued six or seven songs in the past several months and that so far the music is hopeful but offers fans something new and with insight into his past.

“The song (I wrote with Joyce and Spillman) is a bit of my journey over the last six years, my transition,” he says. “I have it represented in there, and I like it because it got represented in a song that’s otherwise pretty upbeat, and I didn’t think that would be the place for that kind of lyric, but it works.”

As for when the new music will be on store shelves, Urban says it probably will be sometime next year and that carving out a handsome chunk of time to make an album is something he’s always wanted to do.

This time, however, it was more than just a want.

“It just isn’t easy to do,” he says. “But it just feels very, very strong in me to do it. I am putting a tour on next year, but it won’t be early in the year, so there is somewhat of a need for an album sooner than later. But I just would like for the album to be right.

“We can’t keep remaking the same record.”

— Cindy Watts, The Tennessean

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