NEW YORK (AP) — Decades into one of the most enduring careers in contemporary country music, and you might think Keith Urban managed the whole album thing. But his eleventh studio album, “High,” which was released on Friday, was no picnic.

Four years have passed since “The Speed ​​​​of Now Part 1” in 2020, and in that time Urban wrote another record, “615”, and scrapped it.

“It was the only time I went into the studio with a clear intention of making a certain kind of record that had a specific focus. I started to wonder if my musical adventurousness on records didn’t need a bit more discipline,” he laughs. “The end result was this thing that was just a bit linear. It was just a lot of the same and lacked the spirit of curiosity about the boundaries and places I’d like to explore and visit.”

Instead, Urban returned to what he does best – flexibility in the studio, regardless of genre restrictions, the magic of uninhibited songwriting — a reference to one of his favorite albums, the New Radicals’ 1998 alt-rock classic “Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too,” with its oscillating qualities. One song has impeccable structure and recording, the next is “a stream of consciousness, random, I don’t even know what it is,” he says. “The album had this beautiful flowing energy of order and chaos… The spirit of most of my albums had an element of that.”

Just like “High” – from the sexy, playful duet “Go Home WU”, written together with BRELAND And with Lainey Wilson, from the road trip romance “Heart Like a Hometown” and the honky-tonk rush “Laughin’ All the Way to the Drank” to the not-so-indirect ballad “Love Is Hard” and the slow “Dodge in a Silverado”.

Changes in tempo underline the album and reflect its emotional range. The first punch in the gut comes early: the cheerful “Straight Line” hits like a wild night, “Messed Up As Me” brings sobering daylight.

For Urban, those sensibilities are life. “I have a dutiful, responsible, reliable side. And I have this animalistic, wild, reckless, irresponsible side that wonders, ‘What does this button do?'” he says. “The spirit of those two things is a major part of who I am, and hopefully this album captures that.”

To express this specific human experience, the order of “High” was crucial. It had to end with “Break the Chain,” a soulful examination of dysfunctional family dynamics.

“It has a lot to do with my father and the fact that I was born into a family where an alcoholic father and the challenges that come with that,” he says of the song. “My job now is maybe to break that chain and do something different. But I didn’t mention alcohol once in the song because I didn’t want it to be about alcohol. It’s really about behavioral patterns that we all learn very quickly to survive in any environment we find ourselves in.” Urban has been sober for nearly two decades.

He wrote the song with Marc Scibilia the first day they met. Urban walked into Scibilia’s studio in Nashville, we had barely spoken, and started writing. It started with the guitar, the overdubs, the melody, a second verse, and then a particularly devastating lyric pours out of Urban: “Never sure/What made him so mad at the world/Mad at me/I was just a kid/I won’t do the same.”

“I just burst out crying on this guy’s couch like I was in the fetal position, like I was in therapy,” Urban recalls. “He looked over and was like, ‘Hmm, must be true.’ And then he went back to work. And it was the perfect response because it was non-judgmental. It had no opinion. And he just let me stay in there and finish the song. And that was it.”

He then suggests that like all the songs on this record, from the clear good-time records to the others that perhaps deal with more complicated emotions, it is “a hopeful song.”

“It offers hope and a way out of a situation that many people may find themselves in,” he says, because it reassures them that they have the strength to get out of it.