Keith Urban Reflects on Taylor Swift Opening for Him on Tour: ‘She Was Amazing Even Back Then’
The country star also recalled how his former supporting act once pranked him onstage.
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Taylor Swift and Keith Urban go way back. Long, long before she was one of the world’s biggest pop stars, the 14-time Grammy winner was an up-and-coming country artist opening for the Australian-American star on tour — memories of which Urban shared during an appearance on Thursday’s (Dec. 12) Jennifer Hudson Show.
Speaking to host Jennifer Hudson, who showed a teenage Swift performing at one of his shows on the screen behind them, Urban gushed that the “Anti-Hero” singer “was amazing even back then.”
“I always stood up front and watched her sing, and I’m like, ‘Oh she is singing way off into this other thing,'” he continued, gesturing into the distance. “You could see it. She was playing way past where she was already.”
The “Blue Ain’t Your Color” singer and Dreamgirls star then looked back at videos of Swift and her band pranking Urban by crashing one of his performances while dressed as the members of Kiss — a play on the country star’s song “Kiss a Girl.” “I thought it was Kiss for a minute,” he recalled to Hudson of the moment, the hilarious behind-the-scenes of which Swift documented in a 2009 vlog. “It was so good.”
Urban also opened up about how his Fearless (Taylor’s Version) duet, a From the Vault track titled “That’s When,” came to be. “She just texted me and said, ‘I have a song that I want you to sing on,'” he said. “I said, ‘Can you send me the song?’ The next thing she texts me the song — I was in a food court at a shopping mall at the time.”
After listening to the song through his earbuds in the mall, Urban came aboard and recorded the track for Fearless (Taylor’s Version), the first of Swift’s ongoing re-recording project. The LP spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2021.
Watch Urban open up about his past with Swift above.
