He’s a rustic music star, however eager listeners know Keith Urban’s songwriting fashion is fluid throughout genres. Still, certainly nobody anticipated the shift of his 2026 album, “Flow State.” It options an authentic music with music legend, Michael McDonald, and 10 yacht rock covers.
The time period is used as a catchall for comfortable rock launched within the mid-to-late ‘70s and early ’80s. Think classics like Player’s “Baby Come Back” and Grover Washington Jr. and Bill Withers’ “Just the Two of Us.”
Even Urban is shocked by his pivot. Few noticed it coming. “I didn’t either, no,” he laughed.
It started with the recording. Urban bought and restored the previous Tracking Room studio in Nashville, renaming it The Sound. To break within the house, he employed just a few session musicians. “I suggested that we do a yacht rock song just because I’ve always loved that loosely defined genre, and the songs are great and the arrangements are bulletproof,” he mentioned.
Urban, producer Dann Huff and the band recorded two songs in in the future. They have been on hearth, so just a few extra classes have been booked. And then just a few extra. “I thought, well, maybe this will be an EP, something that’s in between albums,” he mentioned. It stored rising, finally revealing itself to be a full-length launch. “It really took on a life of its own.”
Urban says he and his crew have been enjoying and recording purely for the enjoyment of it. He says yacht rock is the “perfect genre for that spirit” — one outlined by a sort of ease of presence.
But for his first album with covers, Urban wasn’t curious about corrupting the classics or making an attempt to completely replicate them. “Flow State” exists someplace within the center, along with his sonic signatures intact. Extended outros have been a pure place for experimentation. Take, for instance, “Summer Breeze.” After recording the monitor, Urban and engineer Mark Dobson determined to increase the top with keyboard and acoustic guitar. “We assembled it after the fact, and it became this other piece,” he mentioned. “Those moments kept presenting themselves, of where we could make it our own while still honoring the original.”
It’s prevalent all through the album, together with on the file’s collaborations: Little Big Town on Walter Egan’s “Magnet and Steel” and John Mayer on Bread’s “The Guitar Man.”
The sole authentic monitor on “Flow State” is “We Go Back,” a nostalgic tune a few couple who separate and meet up later in life. Urban wrote it with BRELAND, Sam Sumser and Sean Small in 2020. “I said to the guys, ‘Oh my God, if we’re going to write a yacht rock song, imagine Mike McDonald singing in the chorus,” he recalled.
Fast ahead to 2026, when the yacht rock covers album materialized, and Urban’s supervisor recommended he work with Kenny Loggins or McDonald for it. They despatched McDonald “We Go Back” and the remainder is historical past.
“Luckily, he loved it,” he mentioned. “But man, six years later to actually have him on this song when we just imagined him singing it all those years ago was just crazy. It was so surreal.”
Especially since Urban wasn’t fascinated with writing originals for the album within the first place — the items merely fell into place.
Urban describes the songs he selected to cowl on “Flow State” as feeling pretty much as good to sing now as they did after they have been preliminary launch.
“The music was almost an antidote to the stresses of the times. And I think the reason it hits now is for the exact same reason it did back then, which is — there’s just so much divisiveness,” he defined. The songs give audiences in 2026 the chance to flee and to revel within the joyfulness of the music.
They are a balm for listeners and for Urban.
In January, actor Nicole Kidman and Urban have been formally divorced after 19 years of marriage. The paperwork said that the couple has undergone “marital difficulties and irreconcilable differences.”
Urban describes “Flow State” as “an unexpected group of songs and a very unexpected record to find me when it found me, because it was very much a 180 of what was going on at the time.”
“The record’s called ‘Flow State’ for a really good reason,” he continued. “It really was about just constant movement. And yeah, it was a challenging record to make at the same time, for something that kind of sounds so effortless. It was quite a juxtaposition at the time. But I’m really grateful for the way that the record turned out and obviously I’m very, very protective of my family and I’ve remained that way the whole time.”
As for “Flow State,” he says there’s actual magnificence in the concept a yacht rock music can join folks to at least one one other. “One theme, one feeling, one emotion that just lets us all exhale for a minute — and look up and see a blue sky — just for three minutes and 30 seconds, is so needed,” he mentioned.
That, everybody can agree on.
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