Keith Urban heard a lot of negative comments when he was trying to get his break into the music community. All he ever wanted to do is play music for a living, probably since his dad gave him his first guitar at the age of six. Like the message in his latest song, “Wild Hearts,” “sometimes you just gotta prove ’em wrong” when you’re following your dream.

“That second verse in the song talks about ‘has anyone ever told you you’ll never amount to anything and you’re just wasting your time chasing that tail of a dragon kind of dream.’  I had plenty of those people in my life that didn’t believe in me, thought I was wasting my time,” says Keith. “And I probably found that fuel for my fire even more than the people who believed in me. It was sort of the motivation for proving them wrong was great motivation.”

He recalls one older country artist in Australia making a condescending comment to him after he returned from writing songs in Nashville who ended up adding more fuel to the fire.

“One of my first trips to America when I was about 21, 22, I came to Nashville and wrote some songs, went back to Australia. And I was playing at a country music festival. I’ll never forget it,” he says. “And this older country artist said to me backstage,‘So, where you been?’ I said ‘Oh, I’ve been in Nashville writing songs.’ And I was like so excited and he looked at me and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you’ve got to get it out of your system, don’t ya?’ And I could have punched this guy square in the face. I was so angry at this comment, this kind of condescending, jaded thing that this guy said to me, and I’ve burned on that fuel for so many years. I think about that guy a lot and I’m grateful now that he gave me that fuel to burn on because it was a 180 degree turn from how I felt about my life and what I wanted to do in my life. So, that verse is kind of somewhat of a thank you to the people who say you can’t do it because they give me, people like me a lot of fuel.”

Keith is set to kick off the North American leg of his first world tour in four years, THE SPEED OF NOW WORLD TOUR, June 17th in Tampa, Florida. Prior to the summer/fall run in North America, he’ll be across the pond in the spring with dates in the U-K before heading to his Las Vegas residency in May.