Keith Urban Reveals Why He Was Fired From His First Radio Job
"They fired me. It wasn't my calling after all," he said.
Keith Urban has had a successful career in country music but things didn’t always come so easy. Before his performance at the Mother Church of Country Music on Thursday afternoon (Feb. 23) as part of Team UMG at the Ryman’s Country Radio Seminar showcase, the singer told a comical tale of his very first job in radio as a teenager.
“I want to tell you a story about my affection for radio,” he shares with the country radio industry audience. “It started when I was 15 and I went to intern at a radio station in my hometown of Brisbane because I thought, ‘I’m going to be a radio announcer. This is my calling.’”
As Urban continued his tale, he revealed that his dream was to get behind the microphone in one of the studios and run his own radio show. As luck would have it, one of the two radio booths at his local station was empty so he convinced the station manager to give him access to work on his show.
While the other studio was on air delivering a news report, Urban was hard at work gathering vinyl records to put together his dream show. One of those records included Waylon Jennings’ theme from The Dukes of Hazzard, which he decided to splice in between news clips.
“I put on the music, and I couldn’t hear it, and I flipped this button,” he recalls, as the audience gasped. “Next thing, I see this guy running. Apparently, what happened was, in the next room there was a very serious news report being read, and right in the middle of the news report, it goes ‘Just a good old boy…’ [he sings the opening line of the song].”
Unfortunately for Urban, he learned the hard way that maybe a career as a radio announcer wasn’t in the cards. “They fired me. It wasn’t my calling after all,” he reasons.
Urban is doing more than all right without a career as a radio announcer. The singer recently nabbed the most ACM Awards nominations of any country artist in the genre for the upcoming April 2 awards show with seven nods. Urban finds himself recognized in five categories, including his seventh nomination for Entertainer of the Year and 10th for Male Vocalist of the Year.
