Keith Urban Says He Created His ‘Flow State’ Yacht Rock Album For An Escape: “So Much Tension & Friction & Division”

Keith Urban needed an escape, so he crafted a yacht rock album.

Did anyone expect the 58-year-old artist to enter into his yacht rock era? I wouldn’t say so. Is a yacht rock album what fans were hoping to get from Keith Urban? Probably not, but the talented guitarist and country music star decided to change things up, and announced today that his next album – a yacht rock cover project called Flow State – will be coming out Friday, June 12.

If you’ve never heard of the style of music before, it originated and became popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s… and dads everywhere absolutely love it. There wasn’t really a legitimate name for the sub-genre of rock until someone associated it with “the type of music you listen to while boating.” Considering one of the biggest hits of yacht rock is “Sailing” by Christopher Cross, that makes sense.

And in a recent interview with SiriusXM’s The Highway, Urban explained that the idea for a yacht rock cover album (along with a couple of originals) came about organically. He had bought a studio in Nashville called “The Tracking Room,” and spent a ton of time renovating and restoring it. But by the time it was ready to go, Urban had to go back out on the road.

He still wanted to test out the studio though, which is where the yacht rock came in:

“It was one of those frustrating things where, you know, I wasn’t going to get to record there very much. And so, I was trying to find something that would just be simple and fun to do to just record. And I called Dann Huff and I go, ‘How about we just do one or two yacht rock songs just just to break the studio in for a bit of fun?’

And that was it. There was no big preconceived idea. And we recorded two songs and the session band came in and we all looked at each other and we went, ‘These sound really good.’ And Dann Huff looks at me, he goes, ‘You got any more?’ And I’m like, ‘There’s a lot of them. I mean, let’s do a couple more.’”

So Flow State went from a couple of songs, to a potential EP, to a full-blown album.

Keith Urban pulled a lot of inspiration from yacht rock legends like Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins. Then, he narrowed down some of the biggest yacht rock songs – including hits from Stephen Bishop, Bill Withers and Robbie Dupree – and put together a collection of covers that he wanted to tackle (he even called upon fellow guitar shredder, John Mayer, to help him with a cover of Bread’s “Guitar Man”).

Why? Because he believes that yacht rock is what he and the whole world needs right now:

“It’s escapism and we need it right now. It’s just so much tension and friction and division and uncertainty and desperation might be the word. I think there’s so much fear and desperation in every facet of everybody trying to keep up and be valid and be validated and be worthy of.

And fight insecurity and fight keeping up and all this like insane push and pull of energy that’s pulling us out of our natural way of being and feels like even the weekends we used to have disappeared and we don’t have a space to just exhale for a minute and so this album is just one long exhale.”

Hey… sounds fine and dandy to me. In the past handful of years, Keith has certainly shifted to a really pop heavy sound, and while this isn’t country, it may perhaps be more interesting than some of the vanilla stuff Keith has put out more recently. While I would love to hear him get back to the guitar rippin’ stuff he made earlier in his career, Keith Urban is metaphorically trying to help everyone sail away from the weight of the world with Flow State.

You can listen to his full interview with SiriusXM’s The Highway on Friday May 1. Until then, you can scour the Flow State tracklist, and even press play on a couple of the songs Urban has already released:

Flow State Tracklist

“Steal Away”

“Baby Come Back”

“Magnet and Steel” (feat. Little Big Town)

“Just the Two of Us”

“On and On”

“We Go Back” (feat. Michael McDonald)

“Help Is On Its Way”

“How Much I Feel”

“Summer Breeze”

“I Just Wanna Stop”

“Guitar Man” (feat. John Mayer)