Versatile country singer Keith Urban relies on his ear

Australian country music star Keith Urban has some surprising Hawaii ties. His wife, actress Nicole Kidman, was born in Honolulu, and he sometimes calls her Hokulani, a name her parents gave her.

"It’s tattooed on my chest," said Urban, who performs in Hawaii for the first time Wednesday.

But the connection goes a bit deeper than that, reaching to the roots of his musical talent.

"When I was 4 my father gave me an ukulele," said Urban, who was born in New Zealand and moved to Australia as a toddler. "It was the first string instrument that I was given. I guess he gave me the ukulele because it was smaller and easier to hang onto at 4 years old, but he said I could strum it in time with the songs on the radio, so he figured I had rhythm. When I was 6, he got a guitar teacher to start teaching me chords, and that’s how guitar playing got started for me."

He’s now considered one of the best guitar players in country music and overall one of its most versatile musicians, playing several string instruments, piano and drums.

"I’m a self-taught piano player, and drums and that sort of thing, and it all was born of me just wanting to do my own demos and trying to get my ideas across as well. I would hear these things in my head, and I’d want to articulate them to other players."

His is a natural talent. Although one of his uncles was a music teacher who urged him to learn proper music theory, Urban, like many of his music heroes — Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Stevie Ray Vaughan — doesn’t read music. "It always felt jarring, and I felt a different flow of music," he said. "My ear, fortunately, was such that I could do it, just be expressing it and learning it by myself."

All that has culminated in one of the most celebrated careers in modern popular music, though it was a tortuous path. Allowed to pursue music by parents "who didn’t tell me to get a real job," Urban was playing full time in clubs by age 15. He won several music contests in Australia and started sending demo tapes to the U.S., going to Nashville, Tenn., after receiving one — and only one — encouraging letter from a producer there.

He struggled for years trying to catch on, finally hitting it big in 1999 with his eponymous American debut album, which featured two charting singles: "It’s a Love Thing" and "Your Everything."

His star has never waned since. Urban’s blend of traditional country and rock riffs and high-energy performance style have captured more than a dozen awards in country music, along with four Grammys and a Billboard Award for best-selling pop album of any genre, 2005’s "Golden Road."

He’s had 16 No. 1 singles and had his last five albums go platinum. His latest single, a tune by Shane McAnally, Ross Copperman and Josh Osborne called "John Deere, John Cougar, John 3:16," has reached No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard Country charts and No. 1 in Canada, where Urban has a huge following. McAnally sent it to him the day they wrote it.

"I saw the title and thought, ‘What in the world can it be with that title?’ And I heard the song and loved it. It felt so natural for the kind of songs I sing and the songs I love.

"The next step was to get it into the studio and see if I could make it feel like it’s mine," he said. "Fortunately, it came to life in the studio, albeit with me figuring out I had to play bass on the song. And that’s why the song has such a prominent bass guitar riff and vocal to it; that’s how we created it in the studio."

Urban IS quite possibly one of the busiest people in the entertainment business. A dedicated family man, he spoke to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser from London, where he’d gone to support Kidman while she is performing in a play there. Aside from his touring and his recording, he’s been a judge on "American Idol" since 2012, providing a moment of levity when he fell out of his chair as a contestant shrieked out "The Star-Spangled Banner." His schedule in the days after the interview consisted of a three-day stay in London, a trip to Denver for "Idol," another trip back to London, then a visit to Toronto to perform with Taylor Swift.

Urban has also gotten involved in music instruction, developing a set of guitar lessons on CD that is packaged with a guitar he helped design. He said his goal was to make a good, affordable instrument that is easy to play.

"I have a lot of people come to me who ask me about guitar playing. ‘What sort of guitar should I have?’ ‘I have a child who wants to play. How should I start him?’ ‘Am I too old to start playing guitar?’ Just unrelenting interest in playing guitar."

His concert here will feature a "huge array" of material, including from his most recent album, 2013 chart-topper "Fuse," but he is likely to leave the final playlist to the last minute. "You need to have a lot of room for spontaneity," he said. "People seem to want particular songs, or you’re playing solos and you’re in the zone, and you can feel the crowd is in the zone and you just extend things and just kind of flow with it all."

Kidman won’t accompany him on his visit here, but he’ll have another way to rekindle his connection to Hawaii.

"Somebody gave me an ukulele last year, and I had to sort of figure out the chords and how to play it," he said. "I would love to delve into that a little bit more."