Keith Urban – Defying Gravity – CD Review

15 years ago Liv Carter 11

Keith Urban – Defying Gravity (Capitol Nashville, 2009) in stores March 31st

This review has been a week-long process. It was written, re-written, thrown out and written again. I mean, this is Keith we’re talking about… Objectivity was difficult to find.
Let me start with this statement: ‘Defying Gravity’ is the follow-up to the deeply flawed ‘Love, Pain and the Whole Crazy Thing’ and almost everything on it is better than anything on its predecessor (with the exception of ‘Stupid Boy’).
The cute lead-off single ‘Sweet Thing’ is fairly representative for the rest of the material; layers upon layers of music combined with strong vocals and Dann Huff’s ultraclean production. Second single ‘Kiss a Girl’, for which a pretty special video is in the works, is a totally harmless ditty about feeling ready for love again after a broken heart; a theme repeated on three other tracks.
While those two singles are more about pop, slightly ‘countrier’ sounds are found on the playful ‘Why’s It Feel So Long’ and the rocking ‘Hit the Ground Runnin’’. Look for the latter in the new live set, it’s sure to get any crowd going! The strong ‘If Ever I could Love’ is all rhythm while the floaty ‘Only You Can Love Me This Way’ is all melody, the two qualities are neatly combined on the confident ‘Standing Right in Front of You’.
From the sweetly caressed acoustic on ‘Only You Can Love Me This Way’ past the unleashed electric on ‘Hit the Ground Runnin’’ to the crying guitar on ‘Til Summer Comes Around’, Keith’s 6-string mastery is front and center. Though clearly capable, Keith resists ‘look ma, no hands’ showiness but instead uses guitar lines almost as a second vocal track; the guitars have never been more effective.
It’s difficult to pick just a few standout tracks but the melancholy ‘Til Summer Comes Around’ needs mentioning for probably the best vocals Keith’s laid down so far, as well as the bursting-with-life Radney Foster cover ‘I’m In’.
‘Defying Gravity’ does have its problems, the main one being the banality of some of its lyrics and there are far too many ‘filler lines’. Why are we in both ‘Sweet Thing’ and ‘Kiss a Girl’ told that ‘the night is young’? In ‘My Heart is Open’, a line like ‘don’t you know that you can believe me/when I say that I’m your man’ is weak at best. Combined with the oddly uninspired vocals this is the album’s weakest track. For a large part of the last tour the song that played just before Keith’s set was the New Radicals’ ‘You Get What You Give’. He must have heard it one too many times as the intro to ‘Standing Right in Front of You’ is (unintentionally?) almost a copy of that song’s opening.
But then Keith clearly doesn’t mind recycling. ‘Thank You’ is (disappointingly) just a re-write of ‘Got It Right This Time’ and is quite literally a thank-you note to his wife, Nicole. Now, without wanting to take anything away from the positive influence she has had, no one should say they ‘owe it all’ to someone else. I believe that overcoming anything starts with the person themselves and part of me would really like to see Keith give himself some credit for what he’s achieved and how strong he himself has been.
Keith Urban is my favorite artist, something I make no apologies for, and here is part of the reason why: after just a few days some of these songs have already found a place in my life. Both ‘Kiss a Girl’ and ‘If Ever I Could Love’, with its outtro lines of ‘I got hurt so bad I swore I’d never let another get inside this heart of mine /but you touched my hand and every plan that I had disappeared like a falling star/and there’s a new beginning and I’m moving to the rhythm of a beating, braver heart’, have already got great personal significance for me.
I am not going to pretend to be totally objective about this album and just say this is a very, very good CD. When the previous album was released, I all but tore it to shreds so this is not good just because it’s a Keith Urban CD. It may be a bit cliche or overproduced in places but it’s inviting, honest and above all wonderfully positive!
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Liv Carter

Liv Carter

Liv is a career coach for creatives, and the people who work with them.
She holds several certificates from Berklee College of Music, and a certificate in Positive Psychology from UC Berkeley.
Her main influences are coffee, cats, and Alexander Hamilton.
Liv Carter

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