Country music fans passing through the Nashville International Airport on Sunday (March 3) got quite the surprise. Keith Urban hopped on a stage catered to up-and-coming acts for an unadvertised live performance of not-yet seasonally-appropriate song "Long Hot Summer."
"You never know who will popup at BNA!," wrote the airport on its Instagram account. "Keith Urban is currently on the BNA Live Stage in the C Concourse Food Court!"
The social media post was accompanied by video from Urban's mini-set.
"Wonder how many people missed their flights because of this lol," asked one commenter.
Several travelers lamented that they'd just missed Urban. Another joked that they'd "throw a $5 in the tip bucket."
Urban's been releasing new music in recent weeks, with "Messed Up as Me" hitting streaming services last Friday (March 1). It followed the Feb. 2 release of "Straight Line."
Per Urban's Aug. 2023 Q&A with the Associated Press, he's prepping his first album since 2020's The Speed of Now Part 1.
" I started working on an album at the beginning of last year," Urban said. "I spent the better part of the year in and out of the studio while I was touring, only to get to probably February of [2023] and sort of look at it all and feel like it really wasn't a group of songs that was speaking to me. There was another album in me, I guess. It was a weird feeling. I actually never had that happen with a record, where I bailed on two thirds of it. I probably kept about three out of those 12 or so songs.
"It was the worst feeling of like, 'Okay, it's back to the drawing board. I got to get in there and start writing some songs,'" he added. "And so really from February all the way through to now, the whole record just took a whole different direction when I had time to write. It was the missing heart of the body of songs that I'd recorded. And everything started to pop, you know, and all three of the next single contenders we've got right now, I'm a writer on all three of them."
