Keith Urban Says Pop-Country Debate Is ‘Totally Meaningless’

Keith Urban is one of the few country artists who has been able to sustain crossover success in both country and pop, but he says those labels don't matter to him. At all.

Urban has had 29 Top 10 songs in country music, with several of them landing on the pop charts as well, including his recent duet, 'We Were Us,' with Miranda Lambert.  But he thinks people put too much emphasis on genres.

"Totally meaningless to me," he tells Michigan's MLive. "I make music and people decide what it is. That’s it. I don’t think about it any more than that. I grew up as a country artist, but had very contemporary country influences. Contemporary country music -- well, what that is, is what you hear on the radio. People have this relentless ongoing conversation about what’s country and what isn’t. It’s never changed. If people really really were country fans, they’d know it’s always been there, in every single decade."

The Aussie, whose latest album, 'Fuse,' blended several of his favorite styles of music, says country music is big enough to encompass parts of several different genres.

"What’s great about country is its simple, organic way of absorbing pop inspirations into its sound, and pulling the genre forward," he adds. "It’s been that way since the ’50s. That period, the mid-to-late ’50s, when rock ‘n’ roll exploded, it started to take over the country audience. Guys like Chet Atkins intentionally started to put string sections on country songs, which had never been done before. Everybody at the time thought that was sacrilegious -- they said, 'That doesn’t sound anything like Ernest Tubb. What are you doing?' But it was a way for them to keep the sound moving forward and expand the boundaries."

The 46-year-old says people need to listen to music based on what they love, and not what it is called.

"It’s a spirit," he explains. "I’ve always thought that. Country is a state of mind. At the end of the day, people decide what they want to call it, if they want to call it anything. Normally, you buy something because it resonates with you."

Urban will return for his second season as a judge on 'American Idol' on Jan. 15, where he will be joined by Jennifer Lopez and Harry Connick, Jr. He'll juggle that with his Light the Fuse Tour, for which he will perform a series of Canadian shows this week. See all of his upcoming concerts here.