Keith Urban Performs Drive-In Concert for Vanderbilt University Health Care Workers

Keith Urban is continuing to lift people’s spirits in the way he knows how during the coronavirus pandemic, performing a drive-in concert for health care workers on Thursday night. The country star performed at Stardust Drive-In, an outdoor drive-in about 40 miles east of Nashville, in Watertown, Tennessee, and played for around 200 front line workers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center including doctors, nurses and emergency technicians.

Around 125 cars, which is around half capacity for Stardust, drove up to watch Urban play for around an hour. Urban said he performed to “say thanks to the healthcare workers who are putting their lives on the line for us every day… performing in this environment, with everyone in their cars at a safe distance from one another, seems like an amazing opportunity for everybody to just let go and have fun,” he continued. “And I’m a musician, I have to play.”

“A huge THANK YOU to all [Vanderbilt Health] frontline workers who attended tonight’s special show at the drive in!” Urban captioned a clip of the show on Instagram. The clip saw fans parked over six feet apart and sitting on the hoods of their cars and clapping as they enjoyed the show, which was broadcast onto the big screen behind Urban.

The 52-year-old opened up about the surprise during an appearance on the Today show on Friday, telling Savannah Guthrie that the show “was a load of fun.” “We didn’t know what to expect. From a performance standpoint it was a bit of a proof of concept show as well to figure out what works, what doesn’t,” he said. “We also really wanted to take the opportunity to not only do the first one but do it for the health care workers because that’s what this is all about right now. They did an amazing job as an audience and I had a great time.”

Urban performed with one other person on stage and used tracks to back him instead of a live band. “We’ve been doing a few of these at-home concerts with just me and my tracks guy, so we have tracks that we can play to, it’s really like karaoke,” he said. “I sing, play guitar and we can sort of do stuff on the fly as well. I have one other guy on stage who has a guitar and a keyboard, we can riff on a few things and of course I can always play solo.”