Keith Urban: What Appealed To Him About ‘The Road’
The final show taping for CBS’s new talent competition show, The Road, is tonight (4/2) at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, and Keith Urban will be front and center helping newcomers make their musical dreams come true.
The new music competition series is from executive producers Taylor Sheridan, Blake Shelton, David Glasser, Lee Metzger, and Keith.
Urban told us of the show, “First of all, it’s a concept that Blake (Shelton) was one of the people behind it, and I loved the idea, and I loved that Taylor Sheridan was going to be involved in it just from a visual standpoint and the style of the show. The concept of putting artists in a real-world environment versus a TV studio was really appealing to me, because I had not seen that before where there’s no vocal coach backstage, there’s no A & R’ing of their songs. They have to choose a cover, and they have to choose an original, and they’ve got to go out and make that work in front of an audience that isn’t there to see them.”
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He continued, “This is a real venue, a real audience that probably lives locally that come to the club all the time and have come to see me play, and these musicians are all competing to basically be my opening acts. Nobody knows who they are, and nobody cares who they are, just like a real club, and they’ve got two songs to come out and make an impression, and then the audience votes at the end of the night.”
Keith concludes, “Blake and I are out in the audience watching all these artists perform — we have a little area that we sit in — and we make comments throughout the performance. The artist doesn’t hear it; people at home are gonna get to hear our thoughts, but the audience votes in the club, and at the end of the night, somebody’s eliminated, so every city we’re losing an artist, and it’s amazing to watch it unfold.”
Premiering this Fall on CBS and Paramount+, The Road has been described as a headliner’s journey to discover the next big artist.
Urban, who is making his way up the country charts with his latest single, “Straight Line,” will kick off his “High And Alive World Tour” at The Wharf in Orange Beach, Alabama on May 22nd.
