Keith Urban Reveals When He Plans to Retire

Keith Urban has been making music professionally for nearly 25 years, and the country star has no plans of stopping anytime soon. During a recent chat with CMT‘s Cody Alan, Alan asked Urban whether he’s ever thought about retirement.

“I will after Mick Jagger does,” Urban said with a laugh, referencing the 77-year-old frontman of the Rolling Stones as Alan added, “Which is never gonna happen.” “Never gonna happen,” Urban reiterated. “I always think of retiring being about a factory job or a desk job or something that’s not your passion necessarily,” he explained. “I play music because that’s what I do. I love making music, and if I weren’t doing it in the gigs that I’m doing it, I would be doing it in little clubs somewhere, or I’d be doing it at someone’s barbecue, or the weekends somewhere, its just what I do. So I would never retire.”

The Grammy winner added, “Plus, Jagger is what, 75? I think we have some tours ahead of us.” Urban, who at 53 is years away from Jagger’s age, released his most recent album, The Speed of Now Part 1, in 2020, and he’s set to return to his Las Vegas residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in September. Urban began his residency in early 2020, and the Australian star was able to play just four shows of the run before the pandemic shut down the concert industry.

Last year, Urban told Rolling Stone that his goal with his residency was to put together the best show possible for his fans. “At the end of the day, you just try and hopefully put together a good show,” he said. “You’re creating an hour-and-a-half-plus party, a night out. I want to do certain things, rise and fall, do this and whatever. I always heard that, at the end of the night, if someone were to say, ‘It was a bummer that he didn’t play, blah, blah,’ I always hope that the follow-up comment is like, ‘That was a really good show. It was really good.’ Because they know that you can’t play everything. People know that, so you just hope that they come away feeling like they really had a great time.”

The singer explained that Las Vegas is a perfect spot for fans to come see him because his music features something for everybody.

“We have, obviously, people that love more of the country side of what I do,” he said. “People that love more of the pop-esque side of what I do. All the stuff that doesn’t really fit into any genre or category, which we’ve got a lot of that kind of stuff.” Urban added that his recent albums “had lots of songs on them that don’t fit into the country category.”

“They’re just my music,” he said. “This place really supports that, because you’ve got all kinds of people coming in. People come in to hear ‘The Fighter’ and they want more songs like that. Other people come in for ‘Blue Ain’t Your Color,’ and they want some more songs like that. It’s great to be able to hit all the targets.”