Keith Urban Is Still Working Out His 2020 ACM Awards Hosting Duties
With the 2020 ACM Awards roughly two weeks away, country music superstar Keith Urban is still ironing out the kinks in his hosting duties. Not only will it be the awards show's first go in Nashville, it's also the first time Urban has ever hosted the ceremony.
The country superstar was announced as the 2020 ACM Awards' ringleader back in February, when the show was still set for April in Las Vegas, Nev. Six months and a continuing global pandemic later, Urban will instead present the ACM Awards in an audience-less edition in Music City. Now, the novice awards show host is figuring out all that will entail, he recently told Taste of Country Nights.
"What my hosting duties are gonna be, I'm still working on right now," Urban admits. "We're still piecing this all together. I love the fact that we're going to do it in Nashville; I love that it's going ahead. Here we are in September — ACMs in September is a first. I love that we're going to be doing it in a few amazing places."
The singer continues, "I'm going to be hosting from Grand Ole Opry House and crossing over to some performances in the Bluebird Cafe and also Ryman Auditorium. So what's great about this is, even though a lot of people won't to be able to come — and obviously we can't have people in the audience — there's going to be a lot of people around the world that get to see these places that have never seen them before."
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Urban is currently in his native Australia, where his wife, actor Nicole Kidman, is filming a movie. The musician will be packing up with his family and heading to Nashville just in time for the ACM Awards. From there, he'll only get a few practice run-throughs as host before the event goes live.
"We'll be doing [rehearsals] a few days before we shoot," Urban explains. "So that'll be coming up very soon. It's complicated by everything. I just have the attitude [that] we'll be like water, and we'll just keep flowing."
Urban's 11th studio album, The Speed of Now Part 1, will be released on Sept. 18, two days after the 2020 ACM Awards. Its creation was also heavily affected by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), with much of the effort being recorded at home.
The 2020 ACM Awards will air the evening of Sept. 16 on CBS.
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