You'd have to go back to Glen Campbell to find a pop-country star whose musical skills are buried any deeper in hit records than Keith Urban.
The guy can really, really play a guitar. But while Vince Gill and Brad Paisley, Urban's peers on country's guitar-hero scene, throw a few licks into even the most mindless single to remind you of their genius, Urban usually keeps his fingers to himself in the studio.
In a live setting, however, Urban turns his inner shredder loose. At Verizon Center on Thursday, he wore more vintage guitars onstage than Reba does gaudy outfits, and worried the strings on all of 'em.
The moody, Dire Straits-ish " 'Til Summer Comes Around," from his most recent CD, " Defying Gravity," is too long to ever be a country-radio hit, but it gave Urban plenty of time to wail. Same with "Stupid Boy," one of the few pages in Urban's songbook where his material lives up to his talents. Urban spent the mostly instrumental second half of the song bending beautiful notes on his 1957 Les Paul Jr. (the single cutaway model, as any of Urban's many gearhead fans could tell you), which he held high and pointed away from his face, as a frat boy would position a beer bong.
Urban knows that most of the folks who nearly packed the arena care less about his guitarsenal than they do his sweet and low-aiming singles, and he and his rock-centric band gave their all to renditions of "Days Go By," "Kiss a Girl" and "Where the Blacktop Ends," songs that sound pretty much the same as each other, whether in concert or on the radio. He slowed things down to croon the pile of cliches ("roll with the punches," "always on my mind," "no one that comes close to you," etc.) that make up his recent hit ballad, "Only You Can Love Me This Way."
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