Keith Urban has recently recalled how the 2010 Nashville flood left his equipment storage complex under water, and ruined his guitar collection just before he was about to record his sixth album Get Closer.
The unfortunate timing meant he had to scour the Internet for a last-minute guitar purchase, a move that made him feel like he was “cheating” on his beloved guitars.
“So we know that our stuff is floating in the water in this warehouse every day, and we can’t get in there to get it and get started drying it out. So days and days of that going on, and I got to start my record, and I have no guitar, so I buy a Clapton Strat off eBay,” he says in a new interview with Rick Beato.
“It shows up. I start the record with this Clapton Strat, and then I’m looking on eBay and I find some nice guitars. I know you and other guitar players might understand this. I felt like I was cheating on my guitars that were on life support in the hospital, and I’m looking at dating sites.
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“That’s what it felt like. I’m, like, ‘You never know. I might have to start a new relationship.’ So it felt so awful, getting anything new while all my babies were floating around in a river. So I got one or two guitars, and that was it. I couldn’t get a bunch of new stuff. I just couldn’t do it.”
Urban also discusses how one of his favorite guitars, a ’58 Goldtop Les Paul he bought from Guitar Center’s vintage room, was resuscitated after nearly getting ruined by the flood. “A lot of this stuff started chipping away post-flood,” he explains.
“But it came out of that thing sounding exactly the same as it was. Crazy the work that [Nashville-based luthier] Joe Glaser and those guys did, and my guitar tech, Chris Miller, did so much restoration work to drive everything out and put it all back together. It’s remarkable how everything survived the way it did. The old guitars fared better than the new ones.”
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