How ‘Guitar Man’ Keith Urban wound up in a ‘Flow State’

Keith Urban’s ‘Flow State’ (MCA)

Keith Urban didn’t set out to make an oldies cover album as the follow-up to 2024’s High.

But once he fixed his sights on a new spot to make music, it seemed out of his hands.

“I have a yacht rock playlist and I found myself walking around, you know, singing a lot of these songs,” the Aussie superstar explains. “And I bought a studio and kinda just to break the studio in for fun, we thought we’d do one or two yacht rock songs. And I never intended to release them or do anything with them. It was just a fun way to break in my recording studio.”

“And slowly over the course of months of touring, every time I was off the road, we’d record a couple more and then a couple more and before I knew it, we were starting to make a record,” he continues. “It wasn’t a strategy, let’s put it that way. The record just took on a life of its own.”

The 11-song Flow State covers the time period from 1972 to 1981, bridging the gap between Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze” and Bread’s “Guitar Man” to “Just the Two of Us” by Grover Washington Jr. & Bill Withers.

Yacht rock legend Michael McDonald guests on the one original, “We Go Back,” with Little Big Town adding their harmonies to “Magnet and Steel” and John Mayer joining “Guitar Man.”